FOUR  AMERICANS 

ROOSEVELT  •  HAWTHORNE 

EMERSON  •  WHITMAN 
913 


Ml 
f 


250    Ot.5 


BY    HENRY    A.    BEERS 


FOUR  AMERICANS 


REPRINTS  FROM  THE 
YALE  REVIEW 


A  Book  of  Yale  Review   Verse 
1917 

War  Poems  from  The   Yale  Review 
1918 

War  Poems  from  The   Yale  Review 

(Second  Edition) 

1919 

Four  Americans: 

Roosevelt,  Hawthorne,  Emerson,   Whitman 
1919 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

ROOSEVELT 

HAWTHORNE 

EMERSON 

WHITMAN 

BY 
HENRY  A.   BEERS 

AUTHOR    OF 

STUDIES    IN    AMERICAN    LITERATURE 
A    HISTORY    OF    ENGLISH    ROMANTICISM 


NEW  HAVEN,  CONNECTICUT 
PUBLISHED  FOR  THE  YALE  REVIEW 

BY  THE 

YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
MDCCCCXX 


COPYRIGHT,  1919,  BY 
YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 


First  published,  1919 
Second  printing,  1920 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.  Roosevelt  as  Man  of  Letters  .  7 

II.  Fifty  Years  of  Hawthorne  .  33 

III.  A  Pilgrim  in  Concord     .  .  59 

IV.  A  Wordlet  about  Whitman  85 


415492 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

IN  a  club  corner,  just  after  Roosevelt's 
death,  the  question  was  asked  whether  his 
memory  would  not  fade  away,  when  the  living 
man,  with  his  vivid  personality,  had  gone. 
But  no:  that  personality  had  stamped  itself 
too  deeply  on  the  mind  of  his  generation  to 
be  forgotten.  Too  many  observers  have  re 
corded  their  impressions;  and  already  a 
dozen  biographies  and  memoirs  have  ap 
peared.  Besides,  he  is  his  own  recorder.  He 
published  twenty-six  books,  a  catalogue  of 
which  any  professional  author  might  be 
proud;  and  a  really  wonderful  feat  when  it 
is  remembered  that  he  wrote  them  in  the 
intervals  of  an  active  public  career  as  Civil 
Service  Commissioner,  Police  Commissioner, 
member  of  his  state  legislature,  Governor  of 
New  York,  delegate  to  the  National  Repub 
lican  Convention,  Colonel  of  Rough  Riders, 
Assistant  Secretary  of  the  Navy,  Vice- 
President  and  President  of  the  United 
States. 

Perhaps   in   some   distant   future  he   may 

become  a  myth  or  symbol,  like  other  mighty 

hunters  of  the  beast,  Nimrod  and  Orion  and 

Tristram  of  Lyonesse.     Yet  not  so  long  as 

7 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

"African  Game  Trails"  and  the  "Hunting 
Trips  of  a  Ranchman"  endure,  to  lift  the 
imagination  to  those  noble  sports  denied  to 
the  run  of  mortals  by  poverty,  feebleness, 
timidity,  the  engrossments  of  the  humdrum, 
everyday  life,  or  lack  of  enterprise  and 
opportunity.  Old  scraps  of  hunting  song 
thrill  us  with  the  great  adventure:  "In  the 
wild  chamois'  track  at  break  of  day"; 
"We'll  chase  the  antelope  over  the  plain"; 
"Afar  in  the  desert  I  love  to  ride" ;  and  then 
we  go  out  and  shoot  at  a  woodchuck,  with 
an  old  double-barrelled  shotgun — and  miss ! 
If  Roosevelt  ever  becomes  a  poet,  it  is  while 
he  is  among  the  wild  creatures  and  wild  land 
scapes  that  he  loved:  in  the  gigantic  forests 
of  Brazil,  or  the  almost  unnatural  nature  of 
the  Rockies  and  the  huge  cattle  ranches  of 
the  plains,  or  on  the  limitless  South  African 
veldt,  which  is  said  to  give  a  greater  feeling 
of  infinity  than  the  ocean  even. 

Roosevelt  was  so  active  a  person — not  to 
say  so  noisy  and  conspicuous ;  he  so  occupied 
the  centre  of  every  stage,  that,  when  he  died, 
it  was  as  though  a  wind  had  fallen,  a  light 
had  gone  out,  a  military  band  had  stopped 
playing.  It  was  not  so  much  the  death  of 
an  individual  as  a  general  lowering  in  the 
vitality  of  the  nation.  America  was  less 
America,  because  he  was  no  longer  here.  He 
should  have  lived  twenty  years  more  had  he 
8 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 
been  willing  to  go  slow,  to  loaf  and  invite  his 
soul,  to  feed  that  mind  of  his  in  a  wise  pas- 
siveness.  But  there  was  no  repose  about 
him,  and  his  pleasures  were  as  strenuous  as 
his  toils.  John  Burroughs  tells  us  that  he 
did  not  care  for  fishing,  the  contemplative 
man's  recreation.  No  contemplation  for 
him,  but  action;  no  angling  in  a  clear  stream 
for  a  trout  or  grayling;  but  the  glorious, 
dangerous  excitement  of  killing  big  game — 
grizzlies,  lions,  African  buffaloes,  mountain 
sheep,  rhinoceroses,  elephants.  He  never 
spared  himself:  he  wore  himself  out.  But 
doubtless  he  would  have  chosen  the  crowded 
hour  of  glorious  life — or  strife,  for  life  and 
strife  were  with  him  the  same. 

He  was  above  all  things  a  fighter,  and  the 
favorite  objects  of  his  denunciation  were 
professional  pacifists,  nice  little  men  who  had 
let  their  muscles  get  soft,  and  nations  that 
had  lost  their  fighting  edge.  Aggressive  war, 
he  tells  us  in  "The  Winning  of  the  West,"  is 
not  always  bad.  "Americans  need  to  keep 
in  mind  the  fact  that,  as  a  nation,  they  have 
erred  far  more  often  in  not  being  willing 
enough  to  fight  than  in  being  too  willing." 
"Cowardice,"  he  writes  elsewhere,  "in  a  race, 
as  in  an  individual,  is  the  unpardonable  sin." 
Is  this  true?  Cowardice  is  a  weakness,  per 
haps  a  disgraceful  weakness :  a  defect  of 
character  which  makes  a  man  contemptible, 
9 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

just  as  foolishness  does.  But  it  is  not  a  sin 
at  all,  and  surely  not  an  unpardonable  one. 
Cruelty,  treachery,  and  ingratitude  are 
much  worse  traits,  and  selfishness  is  as  bad. 
I  have  known  very  good  men  who  were  cow 
ards  ;  men  that  I  liked  and  trusted  but  who, 
from  weakness  of  nerves  or  other  physical 
causes — perhaps  from  prenatal  influences — 
were  easily  frightened  and  always  constitu 
tionally  timid.  The  Colonel  was  a  very 
pugnacious  man:  he  professed  himself  to  be 
a  lover  of  peace — and  so  did  the  Kaiser — 
but  really  he  enjoyed  the  gaudium  certa- 
minis,  as  all  bold  spirits  do. 

In  the  world-wide  sense  of  loss  which 
followed  his  death,  some  rather  exagger 
ated  estimates  made  themselves  heard.  A 
preacher  announced  that  there  had  been 
only  two  great  Americans,  one  of  whom  was 
Theodore  Roosevelt.  An  editor  declared 
that  the  three  greatest  Americans  were 
Washington,  Lincoln,  and  Roosevelt.  But 
not  all  great  Americans  have  been  in  public 
life;  and,  of  those  who  have,  very  few  have 
been  Presidents  of  the  United  States.  What 
is  greatness?  Roosevelt  himself  rightly  in 
sists  on  character  as  the  root  of  the  matter. 
Still  character  alone  does  not  make  a  man 
great.  There  are  thousands  of  men  in 
common  life,  of  sound  and  forceful  charac 
ter,  who  never  become  great,  who  are  not 
10 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 
even  potentially  great.  To  make  them  such, 
great  abilities  are  needed,  as  well  as  favor 
ing  circumstances.  In  his  absolute  man 
ner — a  manner  caught  perhaps  partly  from 
Macaulay,  for  whose  qualities  as  a  writer  he 
had  a  high  and,  I  think,  well- justified  re 
gard — he  pronounces  Cromwell  the  greatest 
Englishman  of  the  seventeenth  century. 
Was  he  so?  He  was  the  greatest  English 
soldier  and  magistrate  of  that  century;  but 
how  about  Bacon  and  Newton,  about 
Shakespeare  and  Milton? 

Let  us  think  of  a  few  other  Americans 
who,  in  their  various  fields,  might  perhaps 
deserve  to  be  entitled  great.  Shall  we  say 
Jonathan  Edwards,  Benjamin  Franklin, 
Alexander  Hamilton,  John  Marshall,  Robert 
Fulton,  S.  F.  B.  Morse,  Ralph  Waldo  Emer 
son,  Daniel  Webster,  Horace  Greeley,  Henry 
Ward  Beecher,  Admiral  Farragut,  General 
W.  T.  Sherman,  James  Russell  Lowell, 
Nathaniel  Hawthorne,  General  Robert  E. 
Lee?  None  of  these  people  were  Presidents 
of  the  United  States.  But  to  the  man  in 
the  street  there  is  something  imposing  about 
the  office  and  title  of  a  chief  magistrate,  be 
he  emperor,  king,  or  elected  head  of  a  repub 
lic.  It  sets  him  apart.  Look  at  the  crowds 
that  swarm  to  get  a  glimpse  of  the  President 
when  he  passes  through,  no  matter  whether 
it  is  George  Washington  or  Franklin  Pierce. 
11 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

It  might  be  safer,  on  the  whole,  to  say 
that  the  three  names  in  question  are  those 
of  our  greatest  presidents,  not  of  the  great 
est  Americans.  And  even  this  comparison 
might  be  questioned.  Some,  for  example, 
might  assert  the  claims  of  Thomas  Jefferson 
to  rank  with  the  others.  Jefferson  was  a 
man  of  ideas  who  made  a  strong  impression 
on  his  generation.  He  composed  the  Decla 
ration  of  Independence  and  founded  the 
Democratic  party  and  the  University  of 
Virginia.  He  had  a  more  flexible  mind  than 
Washington,  though  not  such  good  judg 
ment  ;  and  he  had  something  of  Roosevelt's 
alert  interest  in  a  wide  and  diversified  range 
of  subjects.  But  the  latter  had  little  pa 
tience  with  Jefferson.  He  may  have  re 
spected  him  as  the  best  rider  and  pistol  shot 
in  Virginia;  but  in  politics  he  thought  him 
a  theorist  and  doctrinaire  imbued  with  the 
abstract  notions  of  the  French  philosophical 
deists  and  democrats.  Jefferson,  he  thought, 
knew  nothing  and  cared  nothing  about  mili 
tary  affairs.  He  let  the  army  run  down  and 
preferred  to  buy  Louisiana  rather  than  con 
quer  it,  while  he  dreamed  of  universal  frater 
nity  and  was  the  forerunner  of  the  Dove  of 
Peace  and  the  League  of  Nations. 

Roosevelt,  in  fact,  had  no  use  for  phi 
losophy  or  speculative  thought  which  could 
not  be  reduced  to  useful  action.  He  was  an 
12 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

eminently  practical  thinker.  His  mind  was 
without  subtlety,  and  he  had  little  imagi 
nation.  A  life  of  thought  for  its  own  sake; 
the  life  of  a  dreamer  or  idealist;  a  life  like 
that  of  Coleridge,  with  his  paralysis  of  will 
and  abnormal  activity  of  the  speculative 
faculty,  eternally  spinning  metaphysical  cob 
webs,  doubtless  seemed  to  the  author  of 
"The  Strenuous  Life"  a  career  of  mere  self- 
indulgence.  It  is  not  without  significance 
that,  with  all  his  passion  for  out  of  doors, 
for  wild  life  and  the  study  of  bird  and  beast, 
he  nowhere,  so  far  as  I  can  remember,  men 
tions  Thoreau,*  who  is  far  and  away  our 
greatest  nature  writer.  Doubtless  he  may 
have  esteemed  him  as  a  naturalist,  but  not 
as  a  transcendentalist  or  as  an  impracti 
cable  faddist  who  refused  to  pay  taxes  be 
cause  Massachusetts  enforced  the  fugitive 
slave  law.  We  are  told  that  his  fellow  his 
torian,  Francis  Parkman,  had  a  contempt 
for  philosophers  like  Emerson  and  Thoreau 
and  an  admiration  for  writers  such  as  Scott 
and  Cooper  who  depicted  scenes  of  bold  ad 
venture.  The  author  of  "The  Oregon 
Trail"  and  the  author  of  "African  Game 
Trails"  had  a  good  deal  in  common,  espe- 

*  Mr.  Edwin  Carty  Ranck,  of  the  Roosevelt  Memo 
rial  Committee,  calls  attention  to  the  following  sen 
tence,  which  I  had  overlooked:  "As  a  woodland 
writer,  Thoreau  comes  second  only  to  Burroughs." — 
"The  Wilderness  Hunter,"  p.  261. 

13 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

cially  great  force  of  will — you  see  it  in 
Parkman's  jaw.  He  was  a  physical  wreck 
and  did  his  work  under  almost  impossible 
conditions;  while  Roosevelt  had  built  up  an 
originally  sickly  constitution  into  a  physique 
of  splendid  vigor. 

Towards  the  critical  intellect,  as  towards 
the  speculative,  Roosevelt  felt  an  instinctive 
antagonism.  One  of  his  most  characteristic 
utterances  is  the  address  delivered  at  the 
Sorbonne,  April  30,  1910,  "Citizenship  in  a 
Republic."  Here,  amidst  a  good  deal  of 
moral  commonplace — wise  and  sensible  for 
the  most  part,  but  sufficiently  platitudi 
nous — occurs  a  burst  of  angry  eloquence. 
For  he  was  always  at  his  strongest  when 
scolding  somebody.  His  audience  included 
the  intellectual  elite  of  France ;  and  he  warns 
it  against  the  besetting  sin  of  university  dons 
and  the  learned  and  lettered  class  in  general, 
a  supercilious,  patronizing  attitude  towards 
the  men  of  action  who  are  doing  the  rough 
work  of  the  world.  Critics  are  the  object  of 
his  fiercest  denunciation.  "A  cynical  habit 
of  thought  and  speech,  a  readiness  to  criticise 
work  which  the  critic  himself  never  tries  to 
perform,  an  intellectual  aloofness  which  will 
not  accept  contact  with  life's  realities — all 
these  are  marks,  not,  as  the  possessor  would 
fain  think,  of  superiority,  but  of  weak 
ness.  ...  It  is  not  the  critic  who  counts; 
14, 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 
not  the  man  who  points  out  how  the  strong 
man  stumbles,  or  where  the  doer  of  deeds 
could  have  done  them  better.  .  .  .  Shame  on 
the  man  of  cultivated  taste  who  permits  re 
finement  to  develop  into  a  fastidiousness  that 
unfits  him  for  doing  the  rough  work  of  a 
workaday  world.  Among  the  free  peoples 
who  govern  themselves  there  is  but  a  small 
field  of  usefulness  open  for  the  men  of 
cloistered  life  who  shrink  from  contact  with 
their  fellows." 

The  speaker  had  seemingly  himself  been 
stung  by  criticism;  or  he  was  reacting 
against  Matthew  Arnold,  the  celebrated 
"Harvard  indifference,"  and  the  cynical  talk 
of  the  clubs. 

We  do  not  expect  our  Presidents  to  be 
literary  men  and  are  correspondingly  grati 
fied  when  any  of  them  shows  signs  of  almost 
human  intelligence  in  spheres  outside  of 
politics.  Of  them  all,  none  touched  life  at 
so  many  points,  or  was  so  versatile,  pictur 
esque,  and  generally  interesting  a  figure  as 
the  one  who  has  just  passed  away.  Wash 
ington  was  not  a  man  of  books.  A  country 
gentleman,  a  Virginia  planter  and  slave 
owner,  member  of  a  landed  aristocracy,  he 
had  the  limited  education  of  his  class  and 
period.  Rumor  said  that  he  did  not  write 
his  own  messages.  And  there  is  a  story  that 
John  Quincy  Adams,  regarding  a  portrait 
15 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

of  the  father  of  his  country,  exclaimed,  "To 
think  that  that  old  wooden  head  will  go  down 
in  history  as  a  great  man!"  But  this  was 
the  comment  of  a  Boston  Brahmin,  and  all 
the  Adamses  had  bitter  tongues.  Washing 
ton  was,  of  course,  a  very  great  man,  though 
not  by  virtue  of  any  intellectual  brilliancy, 
but  of  his  strong  character,  his  immense 
practical  sagacity  and  common  sense,  his 
leadership  of  men. 

As  to  Lincoln,  we  know  through  what  cold 
obstruction  he  struggled  up  into  the  light, 
educating  himself  to  be  one  of  the  soundest 
statesmen  and  most  effective  public  speakers 
of  his  day — or  any  day.  There  was  an  in 
born  fineness  or  sensitiveness  in  Lincoln,  a 
touch  of  the  artist  (he  even  wrote  verses) 
which  contrasts  with  the  phlegm  of  his 
illustrious  contemporary,  General  Grant. 
The  latter  had  a  vein  of  coarseness,  of  com 
monness  rather,  in  his  nature;  evidenced  by 
his  choice  of  associates  and  his  entire  indif 
ference  to  "the  things  of  the  mind."  He  was 
almost  illiterate  and  only  just  a  gentleman. 
Yet  by  reason  of  his  dignified  modesty  and 
simplicity,  he  contrived  to  write  one  of  the 
best  of  autobiographies. 

Roosevelt  had  many  advantages  over  his 

eminent  predecessors.     Of  old  Knickerbocker 

stock,   with   a   Harvard   education,   and   the 

habit  of  good  society,  he  had  means  enough 

16 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

to  indulge  in  his  favorite  pastimes.  To  run 
a  cattle  ranch  in  Dakota,  lead  a  hunting 
party  in  Africa  and  an  exploring  expedition 
in  Brazil,  these  were  wide  opportunities,  but 
he  fully  measured  up  to  them.  Mr.  W.  H. 
Hays,  chairman  of  the  Republican  National 
Committee,  said  of  him,  "He  had  more  knowl 
edge  about  more  things  than  any  other  man." 
Well,  not  quite  that.  We  have  all  known 
people  who  made  a  specialty  of  omniscience. 
If  a  man  can  speak  two  languages  besides  his 
own  and  can  read  two  more  fairly  well,  he 
is  at  once  credited  with  knowing  half  a  dozen 
foreign  tongues  as  well  as  he  knows  English. 
Let  us  agree,  however,  that  Roosevelt  knew 
a  lot  about  a  lot  of  things.  He  was  a  rapid 
and  omnivorous  reader,  reading  a  book  with 
his  finger  tips,  gutting  it  of  its  contents,  as 
he  did  the  birds  that  he  shot,  stuffed,  and 
mounted;  yet  not  inappreciative  of  form, 
and  accustomed  to  recommend  much  good 
literature  to  his  countrymen.  He  took  an 
eager  interest  in  a  large  variety  of  subjects, 
from  Celtic  poetry  and  the  fauna  and  flora 
of  many  regions  to  simplified  spelling  and 
the  split  infinitive. 

A  young  friend  of  mine  was  bringing  out, 
for  the  use  of  schools  and  colleges,  a  volume 
of  selections  from  the  English  poets,  all 
learnedly  annotated,  and  sent  me  his  manu 
script  to  look  over.  On  a  passage  about  the 
17 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

bittern  bird  he  had  made  this  note,  "The 
bittern  has  a  harsh,  throaty  cry."  Where 
upon  I  addressed  him  thus:  "Throaty 
nothing !  You  are  guessing,  man.  If  Teddy 
Roosevelt  reads  your  book — and  he  reads 
everything — he  will  denounce  you  as  a  nature 
faker  and  put  you  down  for  membership  in 
the  Ananias  Club.  Recall  what  he  did  to 
Ernest  Seton-Thompson  and  to  that  minister 
in  Stamford,  Connecticut.  Remember  how 
he  crossed  swords  with  Mr.  Scully  touching 
the  alleged  dangerous  nature  of  the  ostrich 
and  the  early  domestication  of  the  peacock. 
So  far  as  I  know,  the  bittern  thing  has  no 
voice  at  all.  His  real  stunt  is  as  follows. 
He  puts  his  beak  down  into  the  swamp,  in 
search  of  insects  and  snails  or  other  marine 
life — est-ce  que  je  sais? — and  drawing  in  the 
bog-water  through  holes  in  his  beak,  makes 
a  booming  sound  which  is  most  impressive. 
Now  do  not  think  me  an  ornithologist  or  a 
bird  sharp.  Personally  I  do  not  know  a 
bittern  from  an  olive-backed  thrush.  But 
I  have  read  some  poetry,  and  I  remember 
what  Thomson  says  in  'The  Seasons': 

The  bittern  knows  his  time  with  bill  ingulf'd 
To  shake  the  sounding  marsh. 

See  also  'The  Lady  of  the  Lake' : 

And  the  bittern  sound  his  drum, 
Booming  from  the  sedgy  shallow. 

18 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 
See  even  old  Chaucer  who  knew  a  thing  or 
two  about  birds,  teste  his  Tarlament  of 
Foules,'  admirably  but  strangely  edited  by 
Lounsbury,  whose  indifference  to  art  was 
only  surpassed  by  his  hostility  to  nature. 
Says  Chaucer: 

And  as  a  bytoure  bumblith  in  the  myre." 

My  friend  canceled  his  note.  It  is,  of 
course,  now  established  that  the  bittern 
"booms" — not  in  the  mud — but  in  the  air. 

Mr.  Roosevelt  was  historian,  biographer, 
essayist,  and  writer  of  narrative  papers  on 
hunting,  outdoor  life,  and  natural  history, 
and  in  all  these  departments  did  solid,  im 
portant  work.  His  "Winning  of  the  West" 
is  little,  if  at  all,  inferior  in  historical  interest 
to  the  similar  writings  of  Parkman  and  John 
Fiske.  His  "History  of  the  Naval  War  of 
1812"  is  an  astonishing  performance  for  a 
young  man  of  twenty- four,  only  two  years 
out  of  college.  For  it  required  a  careful 
sifting  of  evidence  and  weighing  of  authori 
ties.  The  job  was  done  with  patient  thor 
oughness,  and  the  book  is  accepted,  I  be 
lieve,  as  authoritative.  It  is  to  me  a  some 
what  tedious  tale.  One  sea  fight  is  much  like 
another,  a  record  of  meaningless  slaughter. 

Of   the   three   lives,   those    of   Gouverneur 
Morris,  T.  H.  Benton,  and  Oliver  Cromwell, 
I  cannot  speak  with  confidence,  having  read 
19 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

only  the  last.  I  should  guess  that  the  life 
of  Benton  was  written  more  con  amore  than 
the  others,  for  the  frontier  was  this  histo 
rian^  favorite  scene.  The  life  of  Cromwell 
is  not  so  much  a  formal  biography  as  a  con 
tinuous  essay  in  interpretation  of  a  charac 
ter  still  partly  enigmatic  in  spite  of  all  the 
light  thasfc  so  many  acute  psychologists  have 
shed  upon  it.  It  is  a  relief  to  read  for  once 
a  book  which  is  without  preface,  footnote,  or 
reference.  It  cannot  be  said  that  the  biog 
rapher  contributes  anything  very  new  to  our 
knowledge  of  his  subject.  The  most  novel 
features  of  his  work  are  the  analogies  that 
he  draws  between  situations  in  English  and 
American  political  history.  These  are 
usually  ingenious  and  illuminating,  some 
times  a  little  misleading ;  as  where  he  praises 
Lincoln's  readiness  to-  acquiesce  in  the  result 
of  the  election  in  1864  and  to  retire  peace 
ably  in  favor  of  McClellan;  contrasting  it 
with  Cromwell's  dissolution  of  his  Parlia 
ments  and  usurpation  of  the  supreme  power. 
There  was  a  certain  likeness  in  the  exigencies, 
to  be  sure,  but  a  broad  difference  between 
the  problems  confronting  the  two  rulers. 
Lincoln  was  a  constitutional  President  with 
strictly  limited  powers,  bound  by  usage  and 
precedent.  For  him  to  have  kept  his  seat  by 
military  force,  in  defiance  of  a  Democratic 
majority,  would  have  been  an  act  of  treason. 
20 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 
But  the  Lord  Protector  held  a  new  office, 
unknown  to  the  old  constitution  of  England 
and  with  ill-defined  powers.  A  revolution  had 
tossed  him  to  the  top  and  made  him  dictator. 
He  was  bound  to  keep  the  peace  in  unsettled 
times,  to  keep  out  the  Stuarts,  to  keep  down 
the  unruly  factions.  If  Parliament  would 
not  help,  he  must  govern  without  it.  Carlyle 
thought  that  he  had  no  choice. 

Roosevelt's  addresses,  essays,  editorials, 
and  miscellaneous  papers,  which  fill  many 
volumes,  are  seldom  literary  in  subject,  and 
certainly  not  in  manner.  He  was  an  effec 
tive  speaker  and  writer,  using  plain,  direct, 
forcible  English,  without  any  graces  of 
style.  In  these  papers  he  is  always  the 
moralist,  earnest,  high-minded,  and  the 
preacher  of  many  gospels :  the  gospel  of  the 
strenuous  life ;  the  gospel  of  what  used  to  be 
called  "muscular  Christianity";  the  gospel 
of  large  families ;  of  hundred  per  cent  Ameri 
canism  ;  and,  above  all,  of  military  prepared 
ness.  I  am  not  here  concerned  with  the 
President's  political  principles,  nor  with  the 
specific  measures  that  he  advocated.  I  will 
only  say,  to  guard  against  suspicion  of  un 
fair  prejudice,  that,  as  a  Democrat,  a  free 
trader,  a  state-rights  man,  individualist,  and 
anti-imperialist,  I  naturally  disapproved  of 
many  acts  of  his  administration,  of  the  ad 
ministration  of  his  predecessor,  and  of  his 
21 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

party  in  general.  I  disapproved,  and  still 
do,  of  the  McKinley  and  Payne-Aldrich 
tariffs ;  of  the  Spanish  war — most  avoidable 
of  wars — with  its  sequel,  the  conquest  of  the 
Philippines;  above  all,  of  the  seizure  of  the 
Panama  Canal  zone. 

But  let  all  that  pass :  I  am  supposed  to  be 
dealing  with  my  subject  as  man  of  letters. 
As  such  the  Colonel  of  the  Rough  Riders  was 
the  high  commander-in-chief  of  rough  writers. 
He  never  persuaded  his  readers  into  an 
opinion — he  bullied  them  into  it.  When  he 
gnashed  his  big  teeth  and  shook  his  big  stick, 

.  .  .  The  bold  Ascalonite 

Fled  from  his  iron  ramp ;  old  warriors  turned 

Their  plated  backs  under  his  heel; 

mollycoddles,  pussy-footers,  professional 
pacifists,  and  nice  little  men  who  had  lost 
their  fighting  edge,  all  scuttled  to  cover. 
He  called  names,  he  used  great  violence  of 
language.  For  instance,  a  certain  president 
of  a  woman's  college  had  "fatuously  an 
nounced  .  .  .  that  it  was  better  to  have  one 
child  brought  up  in  the  best  way  than  several 
not  thus  brought  up."  The  woman  making 
this  statement,  wrote  the  Colonel,  "is  not 
only  unfit  to  be  at  the  head  of  a  female  col 
lege,  but  is  not  fit  to  teach  the  lowest  class  in 
a  kindergarten;  for  such  teaching  is  not 
merely  folly,  but  a  peculiarly  repulsive  type 
22 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

of  mean  and  selfish  wickedness."  And  again : 
"The  man  or  woman  who  deliberately  avoids 
marriage  ...  is  in  effect  a  criminal  against 
the  race  and  should  be  an  object  of  con 
temptuous  abhorrence  by  all  healthy  people." 

Now,  I  am  not  myself  an  advocate  of  race 
suicide  but  I  confess  to  a  feeling  of  sympathy 
with  the  lady  thus  denounced,  whose  point  of 
view  is,  at  least,  comprehensible.  Old  Mal- 
thus  was  not  such  an  ass  as  some  folks  think. 
It  is  impossible  not  to  admire  Roosevelt's 
courage,  honesty,  and  wonderful  energy: 
impossible  to  keep  from  liking  the  man  for 
his  boyish  impulsiveness,  camaraderie,  sport 
ing  blood,  and  hatred  of  a  rascal.  But  it  is 
equally  impossible  for  a  man  of  any  spirit 
to  keep  from  resenting  his  bullying  ways,  his 
intolerance  of  quiet,  peaceable  people  and 
persons  of  an  opposite  temperament  to  his 
own.  Even  nice,  timid  little  men  who  have 
let  their  bodies  get  soft  do  not  like  to  be 
bullied.  It  puts  their  backs  up.  His  ideal 
of  character  was  manliness,  a  sound  ideal, 
but  he  insisted  too  much  upon  the  physical 
side  of  it,  "red-bloodedness"  and  all  that. 
Those  poor  old  fat  generals  in  Washington 
who  had  been  enjoying  themselves  at  their 
clubs,  playing  bridge  and  drinking  Scotch 
highballs !  He  made  them  all  turn  out  and 
ride  fifty  miles  a  day. 

Mr.  Roosevelt  produced  much  excellent 
23 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

literature,  but  no  masterpieces  like  Lincoln's 
Gettysburg  Address  and  Second  Inaugural. 
Probably  his  sketches  of  ranch  life  and  of 
hunting  trips  in  three  continents  will  be  read 
longest  and  will  keep  their  freshness  after 
the  public  questions  which  he  discussed  have 
lost  interest  and  his  historical  works  have 
been  in  part  rewritten.  In  these  outdoor 
papers,  besides  the  thrilling  adventures 
which  they — very  modestly — record,  there 
are  even  passages  of  descriptive  beauty  and 
chapters  of  graphic  narrative,  like  the  tale 
of  the  pursuit  and  capture  of  the  three  rob 
bers  who  stole  the  boats  on  the  Missouri 
River,  which  belonged  to  the  Roosevelt  ranch. 
This  last  would  be  a  capital  addition  to 
school  readers  and  books  of  selected  stand 
ard  prose. 

Senator  Lodge  and  other  friends  empha 
size  the  President's  sense  of  humor.  He  had 
it,  of  course.  He  took  pains  to  establish  the 
true  reading  of  that  famous  retort,  "All  I 
want  out  of  you  is  common  civility  and 
damned  little  of  that."  He  used  to  repeat 
with  glee  Lounsbury's  witticism  about  "the 
infinite  capability  of.  the  human  mind  to 
resist  the  introduction  of  knowledge."  I 
wonder  whether  he  knew  of  that  other  good 
saying  of  Lounsbury's  about  the  historian 
Freeman's  being,  in  his  own  person,  a  proof 
of  the  necessity  of  the  Norman  Conquest. 
24 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

He  had,  at  all  events,  a  just  and  high  esti 
mate  of  the  merits  of  my  brilliant  colleague. 
"Heu  quanto  minus  est  cum  reliquis  versari 
quam  tui  meminisse !"  But  Roosevelt  was 
not  himself  a  humorist,  and  his  writings  give 
little  evidence  of  his  possession  of  the  faculty. 
Lincoln,  now,  was  one  of  the  foremost  Ameri 
can  humorists.  But  Roosevelt  was  too 
strenuous  for  the  practice  of  humor,  which 
implies  a  certain  relaxation  of  mind:  a  de 
tachment  from  the  object  of  immediate  pur 
suit  :  a  superiority  to  practical  interests 
which  indulges  itself  in  the  play  of  thought ; 
and,  in  the  peculiarly  American  form  of  it,  a 
humility  which  inclines  one  to  laugh  at  him 
self.  Impossible  to  fancy  T.  R.  making  the 
answer  that  Lincoln  made  to  an  applicant 
for  office :  "I  haven't  much  influence  with  this 
administration."  As  for  that  variety  of 
\iumor  that  is  called  irony,  it  demands  a 
duplicity  which  the  straight-out-speaking 
Roosevelt  could  not  practise.  He  was  like 
Epaminondas  in  the  Latin  prose  composition 
book,  who  was  such  a  lover  of  truth  that  he 
never  told  a  falsehood  even  in  jest — ne  joco 
quidem. 

The  only  instance  of  his  irony  that  I  re 
call — there  may  be  others — is  the  one  re 
corded  by  Mr.  Leupp  in  his  reply  to  Senator 
Gorman,  who  had  charged  that  the  examin 
ers  of  the  Civil  Service  Commission  had 
25 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

turned  down  "a  bright  young  man"  in  the 
city  of  Baltimore,  an  applicant  for  the 
position  of  letter-carrier,  "becauste  he  could 
not  tell  the  most  direct  route  from  Baltimore 
to  Japan."  Hereupon  the  young  Civil  Serv 
ice  Commissioner  challenged  the  senator  to 
verify  his  statement,  but  Mr.  Gorman  pre 
served  a  dignified  silence.  Then  the  Com 
missioner  overwhelmed  him  in  a  public  letter 
from  which  Mr.  Leupp  quotes  the  closing 
passage,  beginning  thus :  "High-minded,  sen 
sitive  Mr.  Gorman!  Clinging,  trustful  Mr. 
Gorman!  Nothing  could  shake  his  belief  in 
that  'bright  young  man.'  Apparently  he  did 
not  even  yet  try  to  find  out  his  name — if  he 
had  a  name,"  and  so  on  for  nearly  a  page. 
Excellent  fooling,  but  a  bit  too  long  and 
heavy-handed  for  the  truest  ironic  effect. 

Many  of  our  Presidents,  however  little 
given  to  the  use  of  the  pen,  have  been  success 
ful  comers  of  phrases — phrases  that  have 
stuck:  "entangling  alliances,"  "era  of  good 
feeling,"  "innocuous  desuetude,"  "a  condi 
tion,  not  a  theory."  Lincoln  was  happiest 
at  this  art,  and  there  is  no  need  to  mention 
any  of  the  scores  of  pungent  sayings  which 
he  added  to  the  language  and  which  are  in 
daily  use.  President  Roosevelt  was  no  whit 
behind  in  this  regard.  All  recognize  and  re 
member  the  many  phrases  to  which  he  gave 
birth  or  currency:  "predatory  wealth," 
26 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 
"bull  moose,"  "hit  the  line  hard,"  "weasel 
words,"  "my  hat  is  in  the  ring,"  and  so  on. 
He  took  a  humorous  delight  in  mystifying 
the  public  with  recondite  allusions,  sending 
everyone  to  the  dictionary  to  look  out 
"Byzantine  logothete,"  and  to  the  Bible  and 
cyclopedia  to  find  Armageddon. 

Roosevelt  is  alleged  to  have  had  a  larger 
personal  following  than  any  other  man  lately 
in  public  life.  What  a  testimony  to  his 
popularity  is  the  "teddy  bear" ;  and  what  a 
sign  of  the  universal  interest,  hostile  or 
friendly,  which  he  excited  in  his  contempora 
ries,  is  the  fact  that  Mr.  Albert  Shaw  was 
able  to  compile  a  caricature  life  of  him  pre 
senting  many  hundred  pictures  !  There  was 
something  German  about  Roosevelt's  stand 
ards.  In  this  last  war  he  stood  heart  and 
soul  for  America  and  her  allies  against  Ger 
many's  misconduct.  But  he  admired  the 
Germans'  efficiency,  their  highly  organized 
society,  their  subordination  of  the  individual 
to  the  state.  He  wanted  to  Prussianize  this 
great  peaceful  republic  by  introducing  uni 
versal  obligatory  military  service.  He  in 
sisted,  like  the  Germans,  upon  the  Hausfrau's 
duty  to  bear  and  rear  many  children.  If  he 
had  been  a  German,  it  seems  possible  that, 
with  his  views  as  to  the  right  of  strong  races 
to  expand,  by  force  if  necessary,  he  might 
have  justified  the  seizure  of  Silesia,  the  parti- 
27 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

tion  of  Poland,  the  Drang  nach  Osten,  and 
maybe  even  the  invasion  of  Belgium — as  a 
military  measure. 

And  so  of  religion  and  the  church,  which 
Germans  regard  as  a  department  of  govern 
ment.  Our  American  statesman,  of  course, 
was  firmly  in  favor  of  the  separation  of 
church  and  state  and  of  universal  toleration. 
But  he  advises  everyone  to  join  the  church, 
some  church,  any  old  church;  not  because 
one  shares  its  beliefs — creeds  are  increas 
ingly  unimportant — but  because  the  church 
is  an  instrument  of  social  welfare,  and  a  man 
can  do  more  good  in  combination  with  his 
fellows  than  when  he  stands  alone.  There  is 
much  truth  in  this  doctrine,  though  it  has 
a  certain  naivete,  when  looked  at  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  private  soul  and  its  spir 
itual  needs. 

As  in  the  church,  so  in  the  state,  he  stood 
for  the  associative  principle  as  opposed  to 
an  extreme  individualism.  He  was  a  practi 
cal  politician  and  therefore  an  honest  parti 
san,  feeling  that  he  could  work  more  effi 
ciently  for  good  government  within  party 
lines  than  outside  them.  He  resigned  from 
the  Free  Trade  League  because  his  party 
was  committed  to  the  policy  of  protection. 
In  1884  he  supported  his  party's  platform 
and  candidate,  instead  of  joining  the  Mug 
wumps  and  voting  for  Cleveland,  though  at 
28 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 
the     National    Republican     Convention,    to 
which  he  went  as  a  delegate,  he  had  opposed 
the  nomination  of  Elaine.     I  do  not  believe 
that  his  motive  in  this  decision  was  selfish, 
or  that  he   quailed   under  the   snap   of  the 
party  lash  because  he  was  threatened  with 
political  death  in  case  he  disobeyed.     Theo 
dore    Roosevelt    was     nobody's    man.       He 
thought,  as  he   frankly  explained,  that  one 
who  leaves  his  faction  for  every  slight  occa 
sion,  loses   his   influence  and  his  power   for 
good.    Better  to  compromise,  to  swallow  some 
differences  and  to  stick  to  the  crowd  which, 
upon  the  whole  and  in  the  long  run,  embodies 
one's  convictions.     This  is  a  comprehensible 
attitude,  and  possibly  it  is  the  correct  one 
for  the  man  in  public  life  who  is  frequently 
a  candidate  for  office.     Yet  I  wish  he  could 
have  broken  with  his  party  and  voted   for 
Cleveland.      For,   ironically   enough,   it   was 
Roosevelt   himself   who    afterward    split   his 
party  and  brought  in  Wilson  and  the  Demo 
crats. 

Disregarding  his  political  side  and  con 
sidering  him  simply  as  man  of  letters,  one 
seeks  for  comparisons  with  other  men  of 
letters  who  were  at  once  big  sportsmen  and 
big  writers  ;  Christopher  North,  for  example : 
"Christopher  in  his  Aviary"  and  "Christo 
pher  in  his  Shooting  Jacket."  The  likeness 
here  is  only  a  very  partial  one,  to  be  sure. 
29 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

The  American  was  like  the  Scotchman  in  his 
athleticism,  high  spirits,  breezy  optimism, 
love  of  the  open  air,  intense  enjoyment  of 
life.  But  he  had  not  North's  roystering 
conviviality  and  uproarious  Toryism;  and 
the  kinds  of  literature  that  they  cultivated 
were  quite  unlike. 

Charles  Kingsley  offers  a  closer  resem 
blance,  though  the  differences  here  are  as 
numerous  as  the  analogies.  Roosevelt  was 
not  a  clergyman,  and  not  a  creative  writer, 
a  novelist,  or  poet.  His  temperament  was 
not  very  similar  to  Kingsley's.  Yet  the  two 
shared  a  love  for  bold  adventure,  a  passion 
for  sport,  and  an  eager  interest  in  the  life  of 
animals  and  plants.  Sport  with  Kingsley 
took  the  shape  of  trout  fishing  and  of  riding 
to  hounds,  not  of  killing  lions  with  the  rifle. 
He  was  fond  of  horses  and  dogs ;  associated 
democratically  with  gamekeepers,  grooms, 
whippers-in,  poachers  even ;  as  Roosevelt  did 
with  cowboys,  tarpon  fishers,  wilderness 
guides,  beaters,  trappers,  and  all  whom  Walt 
Whitman  calls  "powerful  uneducated  per 
sons,"  loving  them  for  their  pluck,  coolness, 
strength,  and  skill.  Kingsley's  "At  Last,  a 
Christmas  in  the  West  Indies,"  exhibits  the 
same  curiosity  as  to  tropical  botany  arid 
zoology  that  Roosevelt  shows  in  his  African 
and  Brazilian  journeys.  Not  only  tastes, 
but  many  ideals  and  opinions  the  two  men 
30 


ROOSEVELT  AS  MAN  OF  LETTERS 
had  in  common.  "Parson  Lot,"  the  Chartist 
and  Christian  Socialist,  had  the  same  sym 
pathy  with  the  poor  and  the  same  desire  to 
improve  the  condition  of  agricultural  labor 
ers  and  London  artisans  which  led  Roose 
velt  to  promote  employers'  liability  laws  and 
other  legislation  to  protect  the  workingman 
from  exploitation  by  conscienceless  wealth. 
Kingsley,  like  Roosevelt,  was  essentially 
Protestant.  Neither  he  nor  Mr.  Roosevelt 
liked  asceticism  or  celibacy.  As  a  historian, 
Kingsley  did  not  rank  at  all  with  the  author 
of  "The  Winning  of  the  West"  and  the 
"Naval  War  of  1812."  On  the  other  hand,  if 
Roosevelt  had  written  novels  and  poetry,  I 
think  he  would  have  rejoiced  greatly  to  write 
"Westward  Ho,"  "The  Last  Buccaneer," 
and  "Ode  to  the  North-East  Wind." 

In  fine,  whatever  lasting  fortune  may  be  in 
store  for  Roosevelt's  writings,  the  disappear 
ance  of  his  vivid  figure  leaves  a  blank  in  the 
contemporary  scene.  And  those  who  were 
against  him  can  join  with  those  who  were  for 
him  in  slightly  paraphrasing  Carlyle's  words 
of  dismissal  to  Walter  Scott,  "Theodore 
Roosevelt,  pride  of  all  Americans,  take  our 
proud  and  sad  farewell." 


31 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

HAWTHORNE  was  an  excellent  critic  of 
his  own  writings.  He  recognizes  re 
peatedly  the  impersonal  and  purely  objective 
nature  of  his  fiction.  R.  H.  Hutton  once 
called  him  the  ghost  of  New  England;  and 
those  who  love  his  exquisite,  though  shadowy, 
art  are  impelled  to  give  corporeal  substance 
to  this  disembodied  spirit:  to  draw  him 
nearer  out  of  his  chill  aloofness,  by  associat 
ing  him  with  people  and  places  with  which 
they  too  have  associations. 

I  heard  Colonel  Higginson  say,  in  a  lecture 
at  Concord,  that  if  a  few  drops  of  redder 
blood  could  have  been  added  to  Hawthorne's 
style,  he  would  have  been  the  foremost  im 
aginative  writer  of  his  century.  The  ghosts 
in  "The  -ZEneid"  were  unable  to  speak  aloud 
until  they  had  drunk  blood.  Instinctively, 
then,  one  seeks  to  infuse  more  red  corpuscles 
into  the  somewhat  anaemic  veins  of  these  tales 
and  romances.  For  Hawthorne's  fiction  is 
almost  wholly  ideal.  He  does  not  copy  life 
like  Thackeray,  whose  procedure  is  induc 
tive  :  does  not  start  with  observed  characters, 
but  with  an  imagined  problem  or  situation  of 
the  soul,  inventing  characters  to  fit.  There 
33 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

is  always  a  dreamy  quality  about  the  action : 
no  violent  quarrels,  no  passionate  love  scenes. 
Thus  it  has  been  often  pointed  out  that  in 
"The  Scarlet  Letter"  we  do  not  get  the  his 
tory  of  Dimmesdale's  and  Hester's  sin:  not 
the  passion  itself,  but  only  its  sequels  in  the 
conscience.  So  in  "The  House  of  the  Seven 
Gables,"  and  "The  Marble  Faun,"  a  crime 
has  preceded  the  opening  of  the  story,  which 
deals  with  the  working  out  of  the  retribution. 

When  Hawthorne  handled  real  persons,  it 
was  in  the  form  of  the  character  sketch — 
often  the  satirical  character  sketch, — as  in 
the  introduction  to  "The  Scarlet  Letter" 
which  scandalized  the  people  of  Salem.  If 
he  could  have  made  a  novel  out  of  his  custom 
house  acquaintances,  he  might  have  given  us 
something  less  immaterial.  He  felt  the  lack 
of  solidity  in  his  own  creations:  the  folly  of 
constructing  "the  semblance  of  a  world  out 
of  airy  matter";  the  "value  hidden  in  petty 
incidents  and  ordinary  characters."  "A 
better  book  than  I  shall  ever  write  was  there," 
he  confesses,  but  "my  brain  wanted  the  in 
sight  and  my  hand  the  cunning  to  tran 
scribe  it." 

Now  and  then,  when  he  worked  from  obser 
vation,  or  utilized  his  own  experiences,  a 
piece  of  drastic  realism  results.  The  suicide 
of  Zenobia  is  transferred,  with  the  necessary 
changes,  from  a  long  passage  in  "The  Ameri- 
34 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

can  Note  Books,"  in  which  he  tells  of  going 
out  at  night,  with  his  neighbors,  to  drag  for 
the  body  of  a  girl  who  had  drowned  herself 
in  the  Concord.  Yet  he  did  not  refrain  the 
touch  of  symbolism  even  here.  There  is  a 
wound  on  Zenobia's  breast,  inflicted  by  the 
pole  with  which  Hollingsworth  is  groping  the 
river  bottom. 

And  this  is  why  one  finds  his  "American 
Note  Books"  quite  as  interesting  reading  as 
his  stories.  Very  remarkable  things,  these 
note  books.  They  have  puzzled  Mr.  James, 
who  asks  what  the  author  would  be  at  in 
them,  and  suggests  that  he  is  writing  letters 
to  himself,  or  practising  his  hand  at  descrip 
tion.  They  are  not  exactly  a  journal  in- 
time;  nor  are  they  records  of  thought,  like 
Emerson's  ten  volumes  of  journals.  They 
are  carefully  composed,  and  are  full  of  hints 
for  plots,  scenes,  situations,  characters,  to 
be  later  worked  up.  In  the  three  collections, 
"Twice-Told  Tales,"  "Mosses  from  an  Old 
Manse,"  and  "The  Snow  Image,"  there  are, 
in  round  numbers,  a  hundred  tales  and 
sketches ;  and  Mr.  Conway  has  declared  that, 
in  the  number  of  his  original  plots,  no  modern 
author,  save  Browning,  has  equalled  Haw 
thorne.  Now,  the  germ  of  many,  if  not  most, 
of  these  inventions  may  be  found  in  some 
brief  jotting — a  paragraph,  or  a  line  or 
two — in  "The  American  Note  Books." 
35 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

Yet  it  is  not  as  literary  material  that  these 
notes  engage  me  most — by  far  the  greater 
portion  were  never  used, — but  as  records  of 
observation  and  studies  of  life.  I  will  evep 
acknowledge  a  certain  excitement  when  the 
diarist's  wanderings  lead  him  into  my  own 
neighborhood,  however  insignificant  the  re 
sult.  Thus,  in  a  letter  from  New  Haven  in 
1830,  he  writes,  "I  heard  some  of  the  students 
at  Yale  College  conjecturing  that  I  was  an 
Englishman."  Mr.  Lathrop  thinks  that  it 
was  on  this  trip  through  Connecticut  that  he 
hit  upon  his  story,  "The  Seven  Vagabonds," 
the  scene  of  which  is  near  Stamford,  in  the 
van  of  a  travelling  showman,  where  the  seven 
wanderers  take  shelter  during  a  thunder 
storm.  How  quaintly  true  to  the  old  pro 
vincial  life  of  back-country  New  England  are 
these  figures — a  life  that  survives  to-day  in 
out-of-the-way  places.  Holgrave,  the  young 
daguerreotypist  in  "The  House  of  the  Seven 
Gables,"  a  type  of  the  universal  Yankee,  had 
practised  a  number  of  these  queer  trades: 
had  been  a  strolling  dentist,  a  lecturer  on 
mesmerism,  a  salesman  in  a  village  store,  a 
district  schoolmaster,  editor  of  a  country 
newspaper;  and  "had  subsequently  travelled 
New  England  and  the  Middle  States,  as  a 
peddler,  in  the  employment  of  a  Connecticut 
manufactory  of  Cologne  water  and  other 
essences."  The  Note  Books  tell  us  that, 
36 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

at  North  Adams  in  1838,  the  author  fore 
gathered  with  a  surgeon-dentist,  who  was 
also  a  preacher  of  the  Baptist  persuasion: 
and  that,  on  the  stage-coach  between  Worces 
ter  and  Northampton,  they  took  up  an 
essence-vender  who  was  peddling  anise-seed, 
cloves,  red-cedar,  wormwood,  opodeldoc, 
hair-oil,  and  Cologne  water.  Do  you  imagine 
that  the  essence-peddler  is  extinct?  No,  you 
may  meet  his  covered  wagon  to-day  on  lonely 
roads  between  the  hill-villages  of  Massachu 
setts  and  Connecticut. 

It  was  while  living  that  strange  life  of 
seclusion  at  Old  Salem,  compared  with  which 
Thoreau's  hermitage  at  Walden  was  like  the 
central  roar  of  Broadway,  that  Hawthorne 
broke  away  now  and  then  from  his  solitude, 
and  went  rambling  off  in  search  of  contacts 
with  real  life.  Here  is  another  item  that  he 
fetched  back  from  Connecticut  under  date 
of  September,  1838 :  "In  Connecticut  and 
also  sometimes  in  Berkshire,  the  villages  are 
situated  on  the  most  elevated  ground  that 
can  be  found,  so  that  they  are  visible  for 
miles  around.  Litchfield  is  a  remarkable  in 
stance,  occupying  a  high  plain,  without  the 
least  shelter  from  the  winds,  and  with  almost 
as  wide  an  expanse  of  view  as  from  a  moun 
tain-top.  The  streets  are  very  wide — two  or 
three  hundred  feet  at  least — with  wide  green 
margins,  and  sometimes  there  is  a  wide  green 
37 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

space  between  two  road  tracks.  .  .  .  The 
graveyard  is  on  the  slope,  and  at  the  foot 
of  a  swell,  filled  with  old  and  new  grave 
stones,  some  of  red  freestone,  some  of  gray 
granite,  most  of  them  of  white  marble  and 
one  of  cast  iron  with  an  inscription  of  raised 
letters."  Do  I  not  know  that  wind-swept 
hilltop,  those  grassy  avenues?  Do  I  not 
know  that  ancient  graveyard,  and  what  names 
are  on  its  headstones?  Yes,  even  as  the  heart 
knoweth  its  own  bitterness. 

As  we  go  on  in  life,  anniversaries  become 
rather  melancholy  affairs.  The  turn  of  the 
year — the  annual  return  of  the  day — birth 
days  or  death-days  or  set  festal  occasions 
like  Christmas  or  the  New  Year,  bring  re 
minders  of  loss  and  change.  This  is  true  of 
domestic  anniversaries ;  while  public  literary 
celebrations,  designed  to  recall  to  a  forgetful 
generation  the  centenary  or  other  dates  in 
the  lives  of  great  writers,  appear  too  often 
but  milestones  on  the  road  to  oblivion.  Fifty 
years  is  too  short  a  time  to  establish  a  lit 
erary  immortality ;  and  yet,  if  any  American 
writer  has  already  won  the  position  of  a 
classic,  Hawthorne  is  that  writer.  Speaking 
in  this  country  in  1883,  Matthew  Arnold 
said:  "Hawthorne's  literary  talent  is  of  the 
first  order.  His  subjects  are  generally  not 
to  me  subjects  of  the  highest  interest;  but 
his  literary  talent  is  ...  the  finest,  I  think, 
38 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

which  America  has  yet  produced — finer,  by 
much,  than  Emerson's."  But  how  does  the 
case  stand  to-day?  I  believe  that  Haw 
thorne's  fame  is  secure  as  a  whole,  in  spite 
of  the  fact  that  much  of  his  work  has  begun 
to  feel  the  disintegrating  force  of  hostile 
criticism,  and  "the  unimaginable  touch  of 
time." 

For  one  thing,  American  fiction,  for  the 
past  fifty  years,  has  been  taking  a  direction 
quite  the  contrary  of  his.  Run  over  the 
names  that  will  readily  occur  of  modern 
novelists  and  short-story  writers,  and  ask 
yourself  whether  the  vivid  coloring  of  these 
realistic  schools  must  not  inevitably  have 
blanched  to  a  still  whiter  pallor  those  vision 
ary  tales  of  which  the  author  long  ago  con 
fessed  that  they  had  "the  pale  tints  of 
flowers  that  blossomed  in  too  retired  a 
shade."  With  practice  has  gone  theory ;  and 
now  the  critics  of  realism  are  beginning  to 
nibble  at  the  accepted  estimates  of  Haw 
thorne.  A  very  damaging  bit  of  dissection 
is  the  recent  essay  by  Mr.  W.  C.  Brownell, 
one  of  the  most  acute  and  unsparingly 
analytic  of  American  critics.  It  is  full  of 
cruelly  clever  things:  for  example,  "Zenobia 
and  Miriam  linger  in  one's  memory  rather 
as  brunettes  than  as  women."  And  again, 
a  propos  of  Roger  Chillingworth  in  "The 
Scarlet  Letter," — "His  characters  are  not 
39 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

creations,  but  expedients."  I  admire  these 
sayings;  but  they  seem  to  me,  like  most  epi 
grams,  brilliant  statements  of  half-truths. 
In  general,  Mr.  Brownell's  thesis  is  that 
Hawthorne  was  spoiled  by  allegory:  that  he 
abused  his  naturally  rare  gift  of  imagination 
by  declining  to  grapple  with  reality,  which 
is  the  proper  material  for  the  imagination, 
but  allowing  his  fancy — an  inferior  faculty — 
to  play  with  dreams  and  symbols ;  and  that 
consequently  he  has  left  but  one  masterpiece. 
This  is  an  old  complaint.  Long  ago, 
Edgar  Poe,  who  did  not  live  to  read  "The 
Scarlet  Letter,"  but  who  wrote  a  favorable 
review  of  "The  Twice-Told  Tales,"  advised 
the  author  to  give  up  allegory.  In  1880, 
Mr.  Henry  James  wrote  a  life  of  Hawthorne 
for  the  English  Men  of  Letters  series.  This 
was  addressed  chiefly  to  the  English  public 
and  was  thought  in  this  country  to  be  a  trifle 
unsympathetic;  in  particular  in  its  patron 
izing  way  of  dwelling  upon  the  thinness  of 
the  American  social  environment  and  the 
consequent  provincialism  of  Hawthorne's 
books.  The  "American  Note  Books,"  in 
particular,  seem  to  Mr.  James  a  chronicle  of 
small  beer,  and  he  marvels  at  the  triviality  of 
an  existence  which  could  reduce  the  diarist 
to  recording  an  impression  that  "the  aro 
matic  odor  of  peat  smoke  in  the  sunny 
autumnal  air  is  very  pleasant."  This  peat- 
40 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

smoke  entry  has  become  proverbial,  and  is 
mentioned  by  nearly  everyone  who  writes 
about  Hawthorne.  Yet  on  a  recent  re 
reading  of  James's  biography,  it  seemed  to 
me  not  so  unsympathetic  as  I  had  remem 
bered  it;  but,  in  effect,  cordially  apprecia 
tive.  He  touches,  however,  on  this  same 
point,  of  the  effect  on  Hawthorne's  genius  of 
his  allegorizing  habit.  "Hawthorne,"  says 
Mr.  James,  "was  not  in  the  least  a  realist — 
he  was  not,  to  my  mind,  enough  of  one."  The 
biographer  allows  him  a  liberal  share  of 
imagination,  but  adds  that  most  of  his  short 
tales  are  more  fanciful  than  imaginative. 
"Hawthorne,  in  his  metaphysical  moods,  is 
nothing  if  not  allegorical,  and  allegory,  to 
my  sense,  is  quite  one  of  the  lighter  exercises 
of  the  imagination.  Many  excellent  judges, 
I  know,  have  a  great  stomach  for  it ;  they 
delight  in  symbols  and  correspondences,  in 
seeing  a  story  told  as  if  it  were  another  and 
a  very  different  story.  I  frankly  confess 
that  it  has  never  seemed  to  me  a  first-rate 
literary  form.  It  is  apt  to  spoil  two  good 
things — a  story  and  a  moral." 

Except  in  that  capital  satire,  "The  Celes 
tial  Railroad,"  an  ironical  application  of 
"The  Pilgrim's  Progress"  to  modern  religion, 
Hawthorne  seldom  uses  out-and-out  allegory ; 
but  rather  a  more  or  less  definite  symbolism. 
Even  in  his  full-length  romances,  this  mental 
41 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

habit  persists  in  the  typical  and,  so  to  speak, 
algebraic  nature  of  his  figures  and  incidents. 
George  Woodberry  and  others  have  drawn 
attention  to  the  way  in  which  his  fancy  clings 
to  the  physical  image  that  represents  the 
moral  truth:  the  minister's  black  veil,  em 
blem  of  the  secret  of  every  human  heart ;  the 
print  of  a  hand  on  the  heroine's  cheek  in  "The 
Birthmark,"  a  sign  of  earthly  imperfection 
which  only  death  can  eradicate ;  the  mechani 
cal  butterfly  in  "The  Artist  of  the  Beauti 
ful,"  for  which  the  artist  no  longer  cares, 
when  once  he  has  embodied  his  thought. 
Zenobia  in  "The  Blithedale  Romance"  has 
every  day  a  hot-house  flower  sent  down  from 
a  Boston  conservatory  and  wears  it  in  her 
hair  or  the  bosom  of  her  gown,  where  it  seems 
to  express  her  exotic  beauty.  It  is  charac 
teristic  of  the  romancer  that  he  does  not 
specify  whether  this  symbolic  blossom  was  a 
gardenia,  an  orchid,  a  tuberose,  a  japonica, 
or  what  it  was.  Thoreau-,  if  we  can  imagine 
him  writing  a  romance,  would  have  added  the 
botanical  name. 

"Rappacini's  Daughter"  is  a  very  repre 
sentative  instance  of  those  "insubstantial 
fictions  for  the  illustration  of  moral  truths, 
not  always  of  much  moment."  The  sugges 
tion  of  this  tale  we  find  in  a  quotation  from 
Sir  Thomas  Browne  in  "The  American  Note 
Books"  for  1837 :  "A  story  there  passeth  of 
42 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

an  Indian  King  that  sent  unto  Alexander  a 
fair  woman  fed  with  aconite  and  other 
poisons,  with  this  intent  complexionally  to 
destroy  him."  Here  was  one  of  those  mor 
bid  situations,  with  a  hint  of  psychological 
possibilities  and  moral  applications,  that 
never  failed  to  fascinate  Hawthorne.  He  let 
his  imagination  dwell  upon  it,  and  gradually 
evolved  the  story  of  a  physician  who  made 
his  own  daughter  the  victim  of  a  scientific 
experiment.  In  this  tale,  Mr.  Brownell 
thinks,  the  narrative  has  no  significance 
apart  from  the  moral;  and  yet  the  moral  is 
quite  lost  sight  of  in  the  development  of  the 
narrative,  which  might  have  been  more  at 
tractive  if  told  simply  as  a  fairy  tale.  This 
is  quite  representative  of  Hawthorne's  usual 
method.  There  is  no  explicit  moral  to 
"Rappacini's  Daughter."  But  there  are  a 
number  of  parallels  and  applications  open  to 
the  reader.  He  may  make  them,  or  he  may 
abstain  from  making  them  as  he  chooses. 
Thus  we  are  vaguely  reminded  of  Mithri- 
dates,  the  Pontic  King,  who  made  himself 
immune  to  poisons  by  their  daily  employ 
ment.  The  doctor's  theory,  that  every  dis 
ease  can  be  cured  by  the  use  of  the  appro 
priate  poison,  suggests  the  aconite  and 
belladonna  of  the  homeopathists  and  their 
motto,  similia  similibus  curantur.  Again  we 
think  of  Holmes's  novel  "Elsie  Vernier,"  of 
43 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

the  girl  impregnated  with  the  venom  of  the 
rattlesnake,  whose  life  ended  when  the  ser 
pent  nature  died  out  of  her;  just  as  Beatrice, 
in  Hawthorne's  story,  is  killed  by  the  power 
ful  antidote  which  slays  the  poison.  A  very 
obvious  incidental  reflection  is  the  cruelty  of 
science,  sacrificing  its  best  loved  object  to  its 
curiosity.  And  may  we  not  turn  the  whole 
tale  into  a  parable  of  the  isolation  produced 
by  a  peculiar  and  unnatural  rearing,  say  in 
heterodox  beliefs,  or  unconventional  habits, 
unfitting  the  victim  for  society,  making  her 
to  be  shunned  as  dangerous? 

The  lure  of  the  symbolic  and  the  mar 
velous  tempted  Hawthorne  constantly  to  the 
brink  of  the  supernatural.  But  here  his  art 
is  delicate.  The  old-fashioned  ghost  is  too 
robust  an  apparition  for  modern  credulity. 
The  modern  ghost  is  a  "clot  on  the  brain." 
Recall  the  ghosts  in  Henry  James's  "The 
Turn  of  the  Screw" — just  a  suspicion  of 
evil  presences.  The  true  interpretation  of 
that  story  I  have  sometimes  thought  to  be, 
that  the  woman  who  saw  the  phantoms  was 
mad.  Hawthorne  is  similarly  ambiguous. 
His  apparently  preternatural  phenomena 
always  admit  of  a  natural  explanation.  The 
water  of  Maule's  well  may  have  turned  bitter 
in  consequence  of  an  ancient  wrong;  but 
also  perhaps  because  of  a  disturbance  in  the 
underground  springs.  The  sudden  deaths  of 
44 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

Colonel  and  Judge  Pyncheon  may  have  been 
due  to  the  old  wizard's  curse  that  "God 
would  give  them  blood  to  drink";  or  simply 
to  an  inherited  tendency  to  apoplexy.  Did 
Donatello  have  furry,  leaf-shaped  ears,  or 
was  this  merely  his  companions'  teasing? 
Did  old  Mistress  Hibben,  the  sister  of  Gov 
ernor  Bellingham  of  Massachusetts,  attend 
witch  meetings  in  the  forest,  and  inscribe  her 
name  in  the  Black  Man's  book?  Hawthorne 
does  not  say  so,  but  only  that  the  people  so 
believed;  and  it  is  historical  fact  that  she 
was  executed  as  a  witch.  Was  a  red  letter 
A  actually  seen  in  the  midnight  sky,  or  was 
it  a  freak  of  the  aurora  borealis?  What  did 
Chillingworth  see  on  Dimmesdale's  breast? 
The  author  will  not  tell  us.  But  if  it  was 
the  mark  of  the  Scarlet  Letter,  may  we  not 
appeal  to  the  phenomena  of  stigmatism:  the 
print,  for  example,  of  the  five  wounds  of 
Christ  on  the  bodies  of  devotees?  Haw 
thorne  does  not  vouch  for  the  truth  of  Alice 
Pyncheon's  clairvoyant  trances :  he  relates 
her  story  as  a  legend  handed  down  in  the 
Pyncheon  family,  explicable,  if  you  please, 
on  natural  grounds — what  was  witchcraft  in 
the  seventeenth  century  having  become  mes 
merism  or  hypnotism  in  the  nineteenth. 

Fifty  years  after  his  death,  Hawthorne  is 
already  a  classic.     For  even  Mr.  Brownell 
allows  him  one  masterpiece,  and  one  master- 
45 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

piece  means  an  immortality.  I  suppose  it  is 
generally  agreed  that  "The  Scarlet  Letter" 
is  his  chef-d'oeuvre.  Certainly  it  is  his  most 
intensely  conceived  work,  the  most  thor 
oughly  fused  and  logically  developed;  and  is 
free  from  those  elements  of  fantasy,  mystery, 
and  unreality  which  enter  into  his  other 
romances.  But  its  unrelieved  gloom,  and  the 
author's  unrelaxing  grasp  upon  his  theme, 
make  it  less  characteristic  than  some  of  his 
inferior  works;  and  I  think  he  was  right  in 
preferring  "The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables," 
as  more  fully  representing  all  sides  of  his 
genius.  The  difference  between  the  two  is 
the  difference  between  tragedy  and  romance. 
While  we  are  riding  the  high  horse  of  criti 
cism  and  feeling  virtuous,  we  will  concede  the 
superiority  of  the  former  genre;  but  when 
we  give  our  literary  conscience  the  slip,  we 
yield  ourselves  again  to  the  fascination  of 
the  haunted  twilight. 

The  antique  gabled  mansion  in  its  quiet 
back  street  has  the  charm  of  the  still-life 
sketches  in  the  early  books,  such  as  "Sights 
from  a  Steeple,"  "A  Rill  from  the  Town 
Pump,"  "Sunday  at  Home,"  and  "The  Toll- 
gatherer's  Day."  All  manner  of  quaint 
figures,  known  to  childhood,  pass  along  that 
visionary  street :  the  scissors  grinder,  town 
crier,  baker's  cart,  lumbering  stage-coach, 
charcoal  vender,  hand-organ  man  and 
46 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

monkey,  a  drove  of  cattle,  a  military  pa 
rade — the  "trainers,"  as  we  used  to  call  them. 
Hawthorne  had  no  love  for  his  fellow  citizens 
and  took  little  part  in  the  modern  society  of 
Salem.  But  he  had  struck  deep  roots  into 
the  soil  of  the  old  witch  town,  his  birthplace 
and  the  home  of  generations  of  his  ancestors. 
Does  the  reader  know  this  ancient  seaport, 
with  its  decayed  shipping  and  mouldering 
wharves,  its  silted  up  harbor  and  idle  custom 
house,  where  Hawthorne  served  three  years 
as  surveyor  of  the  port?  Imposing  still  are 
the  great  houses  around  the  square,  built  by 
retired  merchants  and  shipmasters  whose 
fortunes  were  made  in  the  East  India  trade: 
with  dark  old  drawing-rooms  smelling  of 
sandalwood  and  filled  with  cabinets  of  Orien 
tal  curiosities.  Hawthorne  had  little  to  do 
with  the  aristocracy  of  Salem.  But  some 
thing  of  the  life  of  these  old  families  may  be 
read  in  Mrs.  Stoddard's  novel  "The  Morge- 
sons," — a  book  which  I  am  perpetually 
recommending  to  my  friends,  and  they  as 
perpetually  refusing  to  read,  returning  my 
copy  after  a  superficial  perusal,  with  uncom 
plimentary  comments  upon  my  taste  in 
fiction. 

Hawthorne's  academic  connections  are  of 

particular  interest.     It  is  wonderful  that  he 

and  Longfellow  should  have  been  classmates 

at  Bowdoin.     Equally  wonderful  that  Emer- 

47 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

son's  "Nature"  and  Hawthorne's  "Mosses" 
should  have  been  written  in  the  same  little 
room  in  the  Old  Manse  at  Concord.  It  gives 
one  a  sense  of  how  small  New  England  was 
then,  and  in  how  narrow  a  runway  genius 
went.  BowTdoin  College  in  those  days  was  a 
little  country  school  on  the  edge  of  the 
Maine  wilderness,  only  twenty  years  old,  its 
few  buildings  almost  literally  planted  down 
among  the  pine  stumps.  Hawthorne's 
class — 1825 — graduated  but  thirty-seven 
strong.  And  yet  Hawthorne  and  Long 
fellow  were  not  intimate  in  college  but  be 
longed  to  different  sets.  And  twelve  years 
afterward,  when  Longfellow  wrote  a  friendly 
review  of  "Twice-Told  Tales"  in  The  North 
American  Review,  his  quondam  classmate 
addressed  him  in  a  somewhat  formal  letter 
of  thanks  as  "Dear  Sir."  Later  the  relations 
of  the  two  became  closer,  though  never  per 
haps  intimate.  It  was  Hawthorne  who 
handed  over  to  Longfellow  that  story  of 
the  dispersion  of  the  Acadian  exiles  of 
Grandpre,  which  became  "Evangeline" :  a 
story  which  his  friend  Conolly  had  suggested 
to  Hawthorne,  as  mentioned  in  "The  Ameri 
can  Note  Books."  The  point  which  arrested 
Hawthorne's  attention  was  the  incident  in 
the  Bayou  Teche,  where  Gabriel's  boat 
passes  in  the  night  within  a  few  feet  of  the 
48 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

bank  on  which  Evangeline  and  her  company 
are  sleeping. 

This  was  one  of  those  tricks  of  destiny  that 
so  often  engaged  Hawthorne's  imagination: 
like  the  tale  of  "David  Swan"  the  farmer's 
boy  who,  on  his  way  to  try  his  fortune  in 
the  city,  falls  asleep  by  a  wayside  spring. 
A  rich  and  childless  old  couple  stop  to  water 
their  horse,  are  taken  by  his  appearance  and 
talk  of  adopting  him,  but  drive  away  on  hear 
ing  someone  approaching.  A  young  girl 
comes  by  and  falls  so  much  in  love  with  his 
handsome  face  that  she  is  tempted  to  waken 
him  with  a  kiss,  but  she  too  is  startled  and 
goes  on.  Then  a  pair  of  tramps  arrive  and 
are  about  to  murder  him  for  his  money,  when 
they  in  turn  are  frightened  off.  Thus  riches 
and  love  and  death  have  passed  him  in  his 
sleep;  and  he,  all  unconscious  of  the  brush 
of  the  wings  of  fate,  awakens  and  goes  his 
way.  Again,  our  romancer  had  read  the 
common  historical  accounts  of  the  great 
landslide  which  buried  the  inn  in  the  Notch 
of  the  White  Mountains.  The  names  were 
known  of  all  who  had  been  there  that  night 
and  had  consequently  perished — with  one 
exception.  One  stranger  had  been  present, 
who  was  never  identified:  Hawthorne's  fancy 
played  with  this  curious  problem,  and  he 
made  out  of  it  his  story  of  "The  Ambitious 
Guest,"  a  youth  just  starting  on  a  brilliant 
49 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

career,  entertaining  the  company  around  the 
fire,  with  excited  descriptions  of  his  hopes 
and  plans ;  and  then  snuffed  out  utterly  by 
ironic  fate,  and  not  even  numbered  among  the 
missing. 

Tales  like  these  are  among  the  most  char 
acteristic  and  original  of  the  author's  works. 
And  wherever  we  notice  this  quality  in  a 
story,  we  call  it  Hawthornish.  "Peter  Rugg, 
the  Missing  Man,"  is  Hawthornish;  so  is 
"Peter  Schemil,  the  Man  without  a  Shadow" ; 
or  Balzac's  "Peau  de  Chagrin";  or  later 
work,  some  of  it  manifestly  inspired  by  Haw 
thorne,  like  Stevenson's  tale  of  a  double  per 
sonality,  "Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde";  or 
Edward  Bellamy's  "Dr.  Heidenhoff's  Pro 
cess" — a  process  for  ensuring  forgetfulness 
of  unpleasant  things — a  modern  water  of 
Lethe.  Even  some  of  James's  early  stories 
like  "The  Madonna  of  the  Future"  and  "The 
Last  of  the  Valerii,"  as  well  as  Mr.  Howells's 
"Undiscovered  Country,"  have  touches  of 
Hawthorne. 

Emerson  and  Hawthorne  were  fellow 
townsmen  for  some  years  at  Concord,  and 
held  each  other  in  high  regard.  One  was  a 
philosophical  idealist :  the  other,  an  artist  of 
the  ideal,  who  sometimes  doubted  whether 
the  tree  on  the  bank,  or  its  image  in  the 
stream  was  the  more  real.  But  they  took 
no  impress  from  one  another's  minds.  Emer- 
50 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

son  could  not  read  his  neighbor's  romances. 
Their  morbid  absorption  in  the  problem  of 
evil  repelled  the  resolute  optimist.  He 
thought  the  best  thing  Hawthorne  ever  wrote 
was  his  "Recollections  of  a  Gifted  Woman," 
the  chapter  in  "Our  Old  Home"  concerning 
Miss  Delia  Bacon,  originator  of  the  Baconian 
theory  of  Shakespeare,  whom  Hawthorne  be 
friended  with  unfailing  patience  and  courtesy 
during  his  Liverpool  consulship. 

Hawthorne  paid  a  fine  tribute  to  Emer 
son  in  the  introduction  to  "Mosses  from  an 
Old  Manse,"  and  even  paid  him  the  honor  of 
quotation,  contrary  to  his  almost  invariable 
practice.  I  cannot  recall  a  half  dozen  quo 
tations  in  all  his  works.  I  think  he  must 
have  been  principled  against  them.  But  he 
said  he  had  come  too  late  to  Concord  to  fall 
under  Emerson's  influence.  No  risk  of  that, 
had  he  come  earlier.  There  was  a  jealous 
independence  in  Hawthorne  which  resented 
the  too  close  approach  of  an  alien  mind:  a 
species  of  perversity  even,  that  set  him  in 
contradiction  to  his  environment.  He 
always  fought  shy  of  literary  people.  Dur 
ing  his  Liverpool  consulship,  he  did  not 
make — apparently  did  not  care  to  make — 
acquaintance  with  his  intellectual  equals. 
He  did  not  meet  Carlyle,  Dickens,  Thack 
eray,  Tennyson,  Mill,  Grote,  Charles  Reade, 
George  Eliot,  or  any  other  first-class  minds. 
51 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

He  barely  met  the  Brownings,  but  did  not 
really  come  to  know  them  till  afterwards  in 
Italy.  Surrounded  by  reformers,  abolition 
ists,  vegetarians,  comeouters  and  radicals  of 
all  gospels,  he  remained  stubbornly  conserva 
tive.  He  held  office  under  three  Democratic 
administrations,  and  wrote  a  campaign  life 
of  his  old  college  friend  Franklin  Pierce  when 
he  ran  for  President.  Commenting  on 
Emerson's  sentence  that  John  Brown  had 
made  the  gallows  sacred  like  the  cross,  Haw 
thorne  said  that  Brown  was  a  blood-stained 
fanatic  and  justly  hanged. 

This  conservatism  was  allied  with  a  certain 
fatalism,  hopelessness,  and  moral  indolence 
in  Hawthorne's  nature.  Hollingsworth,  in 
"The  Blithedale  Romance,"  is  his  picture  of 
the  one-ideaed  reformer,  sacrificing  all  to  his 
hobby.  Hollingsworth's  hobby  is  prison 
reform,  and  characteristically  Hawthorne 
gives  us  no  details  of  his  plan.  It  is  vague 
ness  itself,  and  its  advocate  is  little  better 
than  a  type.  Holgrave  again,  in  "The 
House  of  the  Seven  Gables,"  is  the  scoKnful 
young  radical;  and  both  he  and  Hollings 
worth  are  guilty  of  the  mistake  of  supposing 
that  they  can  do  anything  directly  to  im 
prove  the  condition  of  things.  God  will 
bring  about  amendment  in  his  own  good 
time.  And  this  fatalism  again  is  subtly 
connected  with  New  England's  ancestral 
62 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

creed — Calvinism.  Hawthorne — it  has  been 
pointed  out  a  hundred  times — is  the  Puritan 
romancer.  His  tales  are  tales  of  the  con 
science:  he  is  obsessed  with  the  thought  of 
sin,  with  the  doctrines  of  foreordination  and 
total  depravity.  In  the  theological  library 
which  he  found  stowed  away  in  the  garret  of 
the  Old  Manse,  he  preferred  the  seventeenth- 
century  folio  volumes  of  Puritan  divinity  to 
the  thin  Unitarian  sermons  and  controversial 
articles  in  the  files  of  The  Christian  Exam 
iner.  The  former,  at  least,  had  once  been 
warm  with  a  deep  belief,  however  they  had 
now  "cooled  down  even  to  the  freezing  point." 
But  "the  frigidity  of  the  modern  produc 
tions"  was  "inherent."  Hawthorne  was 
never  a  church-goer  and  adhered  to  no  par 
ticular  form  of  creed.  But  speculatively  he 
liked  his  religion  thick. 

The  Psalm-tunes  of  the  Puritan, 

The  songs  that  dared  to  go 
Down  searching  through  the  abyss  of  man, 

His  deeps  of  conscious  woe — 

spoke  more  profoundly  to  his  soul  than  the 
easy  optimism  of  liberal  Christianity.  Haw 
thorne  was  no  transcendentalist :  he  went  to 
Brook  Farm,  not  as  a  Fourierite  or  a  be 
liever  in  the  principles  of  association,  but 
attracted  by  the  novelty  of  this  experiment 
at  communal  living,  and  by  the  interesting 
53 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

varieties  of  human  nature  there  assembled: 
literary  material  which  he  used  in  "The 
Blithedale  Romance."  He  complains  slyly  of 
Miss  Fuller's  transcendental  heifer  which 
hooked  the  other  cows  (though  Colonel  Hig- 
ginson  once  assured  me  that  this  heifer  was 
only  a  symbol,  and  that  Margaret  never 
really  owned  a  heifer  or  cow  of  any  kind). 

Mr.  Lathrop  proposed,  as  a  rough  formula 
for  Hawthorne,  Poe  and  Irving  plus  some 
thing  of  his  own.  The  resemblances  and  dif 
ferences  between  Poe  and  Hawthorne  are 
obvious.  The  latter  never  deals  in  physical 
horror:  his  morbidest  tragedy  is  of  a  spir 
itual  kind;  while  once  only — in  the  story  en 
titled  "William  Wilson" — Poe  enters  that 
field  of  ethical  romance  which  Hawthorne 
constantly  occupies.  What  he  has  in  com 
mon  with  Irving  is  chiefly  the  attitude  of 
spectatorship,  and  the  careful  refinement  of 
the  style,  so  different  from  the  loud,  brassy 
manner  of  modern  writing.  Hawthorne 
never  uses  slang,  dialect,  oaths,  or  colloquial 
idioms.  The  talk  of  his  characters  is  book 
talk.  Why  is  it  that  many  of  us  find  this 
old-fashioned  elegance  of  Irving  and  Haw 
thorne  irritating?  Is  it  the  fault  of  the 
writer  or  of  the  reader?  Partly  of  the 
former,  I  think:  that  anxious  finish,  those 
elaborately  rounded  periods  have  something 
of  the  artificial,  which  modern  naturalism 
54 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 
has  taught  us  to  distrust.  But  also,  I  be 
lieve,  the  fault  is  largely  our  own.  We  have 
grown  so  nervous,  in  these  latter  generations, 
so  used  to  short  cuts,  that  we  are  impatient 
of  anything  slow.  Cut  out  the  descriptions, 
cut  out  the  reflections,  coupez  vos  phrases. 
Hawthorne's  style  was  the  growth  of  reverie, 
solitude,  leisure — "fine  old  leisure,"  whose 
disappearance  from  modern  life  George 
Eliot  has  lamented.  On  the  walls  of  his 
study  at  the  "Wayside"  was  written — 
though  not  by  his  own  hand — the  motto, 
"There  is  no  joy  but  calm." 

Sentiment  and  humor  do  not  lie  so  near 
the  surface  in  Hawthorne  as  in  Irving.  He 
had  a  deep  sense  of  the  ridiculous,  well  shown 
in  such  sketches  as  "P's  Correspondence" 
and  "The  Celestial  Railroad" ;  or  in  the  de 
scription  of  the  absurd  old  chickens  in  the 
Pyncheon  yard,  shrunk  by  in-breeding  to  a 
weazened  race,  but  retaining  all  their  top- 
knotted  pride  of  lineage.  Hawthorne's 
humor  was  less  genial  than  Irving's,  and  had 
a  sharp  satiric  edge.  There  is  no  merriment 
in  it.  Do  you  remember  that  scene  at  the 
Villa  Borghese,  where  Miriam  and  Donatello 
break  into  a  dance  and  all  the  people  who 
are  wandering  in  the  gardens  j  oin  with  them  ? 
The  author  meant  this  to  be  a  burst  of  wild 
maenad  gaiety.  As  such  I  do  not  recall  a 
more  dismal  failure.  It  is  cold  at  the  heart 
55 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

of  it.  It  has  no  mirth,  but  is  like  a  dance 
without  music :  like  a  dance  of  deaf  mutes 
that  I  witnessed  once,  pretending  to  keep 
time  to  the  inaudible  scrapings  of  a  deaf  and 
dumb  fiddler. 

Henry  James  says  that  Hawthorne's 
stories  are  the  only  good  American  historical 
fiction ;  and  Woodberry  says  that  his  method 
here  is  the  same  as  Scott's.  The  truth  of 
this  may  be  admitted  up  to  a  certain  point. 
Our  Puritan  romancer  had  certainly  steeped 
his  imagination  in  the  annals  of  colonial  New 
England,  as  Scott  had  done  in  his  border 
legends.  He  was  familiar  with  the  docu 
ments — especially  with  Mather's  "Magnalia," 
that  great  source  book  of  New  England 
poetry  and  romance.  But  it  was  not  the 
history  itself  that  interested  him,  the  broad 
picture  of  an  extinct  society,  the  tableau 
large  de  la  vie,  which  Scott  delighted  to 
paint;  rather  it  was  some  adventure  of  the 
private  soul.  For  example,  Lowell  had  told 
him  the  tradition  of  the  young  hired  man 
who  was  chopping  wood  at  the  backdoor  of 
the  Old  Manse  on  the  morning  of  the  Con 
cord  fight;  and  who  hurried  to  the  battle 
field  in  the  neighboring  lane,  to  find  both 
armies  gone  and  two  British  soldiers  lying 
on  the  ground,  one  dead,  the  other  wounded. 
As  the  wounded  man  raised  himself  on  his 
knees  and  stared  up  at  the  lad,  the  latter, 
56 


FIFTY  YEARS  OF  HAWTHORNE 

obeying  a  nervous  impulse,  struck  him  on  the 
head  with  his  axe  and  finished  him.  "The 
story,"  says  Hawthorne,  "comes  home  to  me 
like  truth.  Oftentimes,  as  an  intellectual  and 
moral  exercise,  I  have  sought  to  follow  that 
poor  youth  through  his  subsequent  career 
and  observe  how  his  soul  was  tortured  by  the 
blood-stain.  .  .  .  This  one  circumstance,  has 
borne  more  fruit  for  me  than  all  that  history 
tells  us  of  the  fight."  How  different  is  this 
bit  of  pathology  from  the  public  feeling  of 
Emerson's  lines : 

Spirit  that  made  those  heroes  dare 
To  die  and  leave  their  children  free,, 

Bid  Time  and  Nature  gently  spare 
The  shaft  we  raise  to  them  and  thee. 


57 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 

Rura  quae  Liris  quieta 
Mordet  aqua,  taciturnus  amnis. 

THE  Concord  School  of  Philosophy 
opened  its  first  session  in  the  summer  of 
1879.  The  dust  of  late  July  lay  velvet  soft 
and  velvet  deep  on  all  the  highways ;  or, 
stirred  by  the  passing  wheel,  rose  in  slow 
clouds,  not  unemblematic  of  the  transcen 
dental  haze  which  filled  the  mental  atmos 
phere  thereabout. 

Of  those  who  had  made  Concord  one  of 
the  homes  of  the  soul,  Hawthorne  and 
Thoreau  had  been  dead  many  years — I  saw 
their  graves  in  Sleepy  Hollow; — and  Mar 
garet  Fuller  had  perished  long  ago  by 
shipwreck  on  Fire  Island  Beach.  But 
Alcott  was  still  alive  and  garrulous;  and 
Ellery  Channing — Thoreau's  biographer — 
was  alive.  Above  all,  the  sage  of  Concord, 
"the  friend  and  aider  of  those  who  would  live 
in  the  spirit,"  still  walked  his  ancient  haunts ; 
his  mind  in  many  ways  yet  unimpaired, 
though  sadly  troubled  by  aphasia,  or  the 
failure  of  verbal  memory.  It  was  an  instance 
of  pathetic  irony  that  in  his  lecture  on 
59 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

"Memory,"  delivered  in  the  Town  Hall,  he 
was  prompted  constantly  by  his  daughter. 

It  seemed  an  inappropriate  manner  of 
arrival — the  Fitchburg  Railroad.  One 
should  have  dropped  down  upon  the  sacred 
spot  by  parachute;  or,  at  worst,  have  come 
on  foot,  with  staff  and  scrip,  along  the  Lex 
ington  pike,  reversing  the  fleeing  steps  of  the 
British  regulars  on  that  April  day,  when  the 
embattled  farmers  made  their  famous  stand. 
But  I  remembered  that  Thoreau,  whose 
Walden  solitude  was  disturbed  by  gangs  of 
Irish  laborers  laying  the  tracks  of  this  same 
Fitchburg  Railroad,  consoled  himself  with 
the  reflection  that  hospitable  nature  made 
the  intruder  a  part  of  herself.  The  embank 
ment  runs  along  one  end  of  the  pond,  and 
the  hermit  only  said: 

It  fills  a  few  hollows 
And  makes  banks  for  the  swallows, 
And  sets  the  sand  a-blowing 
And  the  black-berries  growing. 

Afterwards  I  witnessed,  and  participated  in, 
a  more  radical  profanation  of  these  crystal 
waters,  when  two  hundred  of  the  dirtiest 
children  in  Boston,  South-enders,  were 
brought  down  by  train  on  a  fresh-air-fund 
picnic  and  washed  in  the  lake  just  in  front 
of  the  spot  where  Thoreau's  cabin  stood, 
after  having  been  duly  swung  in  the  swings, 
60 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 
teetered  on  the  see-saws,  and  fed  with  a  sand 
wich,  a  slice  of  cake,  a  pint  of  peanuts,  and 
a  lemonade  apiece,  by  a  committee  of  chari 
table  ladies — one  of  whom  was  Miss  Louisa 
Alcott,  certainly  a  high  authority  on  "Little 
Women"  and  "Little  Men." 

Miss  Alcott  I  had  encountered  on  the 
evening  of  my  first  day  in  Concord,  when  I 
rang  the  door  bell  of  the  Alcott  residence 
and  asked  if  the  seer  was  within.  I  fancied 
that  there  was  a  trace  of  acerbity  in  the 
manner  of  the  tall  lady  who  answered  my 
ring,  and  told  me  abruptly  that  Mr.  Alcott 
was  not  at  home,  and  that  I  would  probably 
find  him  at  Mr.  Sanborn's  farther  up  the 
street.  Perspiring  philosophers  with  dust 
ers  and  grip-sacks  had  been  arriving  all  day 
and  applying  at  the  Alcott  house  for  ad 
dresses  of  boarding  houses  and  for  instruc 
tions  of  all  kinds ;  and  Miss  Louisa's  patience 
may  well  have  been  tried.  She  did  not  take 
much  stock  in  the  School  anyway.  Her 
father  was  supremely  happy.  One  of  the 
dreams  of  his  life  was  realized,  and  endless 
talk  and  soul-communion  were  in  prospect. 
But  his  daughter's  view  of  philosophy  was 
tinged  with  irony,  as  was  not  unnatural  in 
a  high-spirited  woman  who  had  borne  the 
burden  of  the  family's  support,  and  had  even 
worked  out  in  domestic  service,  while  her  un 
worldly  parent  was  transcendentalizing  about 
61 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

the  country,  holding  conversation  classes  in 
western  towns,  from  which  after  prolonged 
absences  he  sometimes  brought  home  a  dollar, 
and  sometimes  only  himself.  "Philosophy 
can  bake  no  bread,  but  it  can  give  us  God, 
freedom,  and  immortality"  read  the  motto — 
from  Novalis — on  the  cover  of  the  Journal 
of  Speculative  Philosophy,  published  at 
Concord  in  those  years,  under  the  editorship 
of  Mr.  William  T.  Harris ;  but  bread  must 
be  baked,  for  even  philosophers  must  eat,  and 
an  occasional  impatience  of  the  merely  ideal 
may  be  forgiven  in  the  overworked  practician. 
On  Mr.  Frank  Sanborn's  wide,  shady 
verandah,  I  found  Mr.  Alcott,  a  most  quaint 
and  venerable  figure,  large  in  frame  and 
countenance,  with  beautiful,  flowing  white 
hair.  He  moved  slowly,  and  spoke  deliber 
ately  in  a  rich  voice.  His  face  had  a  look  of 
mild  and  innocent  solemnity,  and  he  reminded 
me  altogether  of  a  large  benignant  sheep  or 
other  ruminating  animal.  He  was  benevo 
lently  interested  when  I  introduced  myself 
as  the  first  fruits  of  the  stranger  and  added 
that  I  was  from  Connecticut.  He  himself 
was  a  native  of  the  little  hill  town  of  Wolcott, 
not  many  miles  from  New  Haven,  and  in 
youth  had  travelled  through  the  South  as  a 
Yankee  peddler.  "Connecticut  gave  him 
birth,"  says  Thoreau;  "he  peddled  first  her 
wares,  afterwards,  he  declares,  his  brains." 
62 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 

Mr.  Sanborn  was  the  secretary  of  the 
School,  and  with  him  I  enrolled  myself  as  a 
pupil  and  paid  the  very  modest  fee  which  ad 
mitted  me  to  its  symposia.  Mr.  Sanborn  is 
well  known  through  his  contributions  to 
Concord  history  and  biography.  He  was  for 
years  one  of  the  literary  staff  of  The 
Springfield  Republican,  active  in  many  re 
form  movements,  and  an  efficient  member  of 
the  American  Social  Science  Association. 
Almost  from  his  house  John  Brown  started 
on  his  Harper's  Ferry  raid,  and  people  in 
Concord  still  dwell  upon  the  exciting  incident 
of  Mr.  Sanborn's  arrest  in  1860  as  an  acces 
sory  before  the  fact.  The  United  States 
deputy  marshal  with  his  myrmidons  drove 
out  from  Boston  in  a  hack.  They  lured  the 
unsuspecting  abolitionist  outside  his  door, 
on  some  pretext  or  other,  clapped  the  hand 
cuffs  on  him,  and  tried  to  get  him  into  the 
hack.  But  their  victim,  planting  his  long 
legs  one  on  each  side  of  the  carriage  door, 
resisted  sturdily,  and  his  neighbors  assaulted 
the  officers  with  hue  and  cry.  The  town  rose 
upon  them.  Judge  Hoar  hastily  issued  a 
habeas  corpus  returnable  before  the  Massa 
chusetts  Supreme  Court,  and  the  baffled 
minions  of  the  slave  power  went  back  to 
Boston. 

The  School  assembled  in  the  Orchard 
House,  formerly  the  residence  of  Mr.  Alcott, 
63 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

on  the  Lexington  road.  Next  door  was  the 
Wayside,  Hawthorne's  home  for  a  number 
of  years,  a  cottage  overshadowed  by  the 
steep  hillside  that  rose  behind  it,  thick  with 
hemlocks  and  larches.  On  the  ridge  of  this 
hill  was  Hawthorne's  "out  door  study,"  a 
foot  path  worn  by  his  own  feet,  as  he  paced 
back  and  forth  among  the  trees  and  thought 
out  the  plots  of  his  romances.  In  1879  the 
Wayside  was  tenanted  by  George  Lathrop, 
who  had  married  Hawthorne's  daughter, 
Rose.  He  had  already  published  his  "Study 
of  Hawthorne"  and  a  volume  of  poems, 
"Rose  and  Rooftree."  His  novel,  "An  Echo 
of  Passion,"  was  yet  to  come,  a  book  which 
unites  something  of  modern  realism  with  a 
delicately  symbolic  art  akin  to  Hawthorne's 
own. 

A  bust  of  Plato  presided  over  the  exer 
cises  of  the  School,  and  "Plato-Skimpole" — 
as  Mr.  Alcott  was  once  nicknamed — made 
the  opening  address.  I  remember  how  im 
pressively  he  quoted  Milton's  lines: 

How  charming  is  divine  philosophy! 

Not  harsh  and  crabbed,  as  dull  fools  suppose, 

But  musical  as  is  Apollo's  lute. 

Our  piece  de  resistance  was  the  course  of 
lectures  in  which  Mr.  Harris  expounded 
Hegel.  But  there  were  many  other  lecturers. 
Mrs.  Edna  Cheney  talked  to  us  about  art; 
64 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 
though  all  that  I  recall  of  her  conversation 
is  the  fact  that  she  pronounced  always 
always,  and  I  wondered  if  that  was  the  regu 
lar  Boston  pronunciation.  Dr.  Jones,  the 
self-taught  Platonist  of  Jacksonville,  Illinois, 
interpreted  Plato.  Quite  a  throng  of  his  dis 
ciples,  mostly  women,  had  followed  him  from 
Illinois  and  swelled  the  numbers  of  the  Sum 
mer  School.  Once  Professor  Benjamin 
Peircej  the  great  Harvard  mathematician, 
came  over  from  Cambridge,  and  read  us  one 
of  his  Lowell  Institute  lectures,  on  the  Ideal 
ity  of  Mathematics.  He  had  a  most  dis 
tinguished  presence  and  an  eye,  as  was  said, 
of  black  fire.  The  Harvard  undergraduates 
of  my  time  used  to  call  him  Benny  Peirce; 
and  on  the  fly  leaves  of  their  mathematical 
text  books  they  would  write,  "Who  steals 
my  Peirce  steals  trash."  Colonel  T.  W.  Hig- 
ginson  read  a  single  lecture  on  American 
literature,  from  which  I  carried  away  for 
future  use  a  delightful  story  about  an  excel 
lent  Boston  merchant  who,  being  asked  at 
a  Goethe  birthday  dinner  to  make  a  few  re 
marks,  said  that  he  "guessed  that  Go-ethe 
was  the  N.  P.  Willis  of  Germany." 

Colonel  Higginson's  lecture  was  to  me  a 
green  oasis  in  the  arid  desert  of  metaphysics, 
but  it  was  regarded  by  earnest  truth-seekers 
in  the  class  as  quite  irrelevant  to  the  purposes 
of  the  course.  The  lecturer  himself  confided 
65 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

to  me  at  the  close  of  the  session  a  suspicion 
that  his  audience  cared  more  for  philosophy 
than    for    literature.      Once    or    twice    Mr. 
Emerson  visited  the  School,  taking  no  part 
in    its    proceedings,    but    sitting    patiently 
through  the  hour,  and  wearing  what  a  news 
paper  reporter  described  as  his  "wise  smile." 
After  the  lecture  for  the  session  was  ended, 
the  subject  was  thrown  open  to  discussion 
and  there  was  an  opportunity  to  ask  ques 
tions.     Most  of  us  were  shy  to  .speak  out  in 
that  presence,  feeling  ourselves  in  a  state  of 
pupilage.     Usually  there  would  be  a  silence 
of  several  minutes,  as  at  a  Quaker  meeting 
waiting  for  the  spirit  to  move ;  and  then  Mr. 
Alcott  would  announce  in  his  solemn,  musical 
tones    "I    have    a    thought";    and    after    a 
weighty  pause,  proceed  to  some  Orphic  utter 
ance.      Alcott,   indeed,   was   what   might   be 
called  the  leader  on  the  floor;  and  he  was 
ably  seconded  by  Miss  Elizabeth  Peabody, 
the   sister   of   Nathaniel   Hawthorne's   wife. 
Miss  Peabody  was  well  known  as  the  intro 
ducer  of  the  German  kindergarten,  and  for 
her  life-long  zeal  in  behalf  of  all  kinds  of 
philanthropies  and  reforms.     Henry  James 
was  accused  of  having  caricatured  her  in  his 
novel  "The  Bostonians,"  in  the  figure  of  the 
dear,  visionary,  vaguely  benevolent  old  lady 
who    is    perpetually    engaged    in    promoting 
"causes,"    attending    conventions,    carrying 
66 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 
on  correspondence,  forming  committees, 
drawing  up  resolutions,  and  the  like;  and 
who  has  so  many  "causes"  on  hand  at  once 
that  she  gets  them  all  mixed  up  and  cannot 
remember  which  of  her  friends  are  spiritual 
ists  and  which  of  them  are  concerned  in 
woman's  rights  movements,  temperance  agi 
tations,  and  universal  peace  associations. 
Mr.  James  denied  that  he  meant  Miss  Pea- 
body,  whom  he  had  never  met  or  known.  If 
so,  he  certainly  divined  the  type.  In  her  later 
years,  Miss  Peabody  was  nicknamed  "the 
grandmother  oFBoston." 

I  have  to  acknowledge,  to  my  shame,  that 
I  was  often  a  truant  to  the  discussions  of 
the  School,  which  met  three  hours  in  the 
morning  and  three  in  the  afternoon.  The 
weather  was  hot  and  the  air  in  the  Orchard 
House  was  drowsy.  There  were  many  out 
side  attractions,  and  more  and  more  I  was 
tempted  to  leave  the  philosophers  to  reason 
high— 

Of  providence,,  foreknowledge,  will,  and  fate — 
Fixed  fate,  free  will,  foreknowledge  absolute — 

while  I  wandered  off  through  the  woods  for 
a  bath  in  Walden,  some  one  and  a  half  miles 
away,  through  whose  transparent  waters  the 
pebbles  on  the  bottom  could  be  plainly  seen 
at  a  depth  of  thirty  feet.  Sometimes  I  went 
farther  afield  to  White  Pond,  described  by 
67 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

Thoreau,  or  Baker  Farm,  sung  by  Ellery 
Charming.  A  pleasant  young  fellow  at  Miss 
Emma  Barrett's  boarding  house,  who  had 
no  philosophy,  but  was  a  great  hand  at 
picnics  and  boating  and  black-berrying 
parties,  paddled  me  up  the  Assabeth,  or 
North  Branch,  in  his  canoe,  and  drove  me 
over  to  Longfellow's  Wayside  Inn  at  Sud- 
bury.  And  so  it  happens  that,  when  I  look 
back  at  my  fortnight  at  Concord,  what  I 
think  of  is  not  so  much  the  murmurous 
auditorium  of  the  Orchard  House,  as  the  row 
of  colossal  sycamores  along  the  village  side 
walk  that  led  us  thither,  whose  smooth, 
mottled  trunks  in  the  moonlight  resembled  a 
range  of  Egyptian  temple  columns.  Or  I 
haunt  again  at  twilight  the  grounds  of  the 
Old  Manse,  where  Hawthorne  wrote  his 
"Mosses,"  and  the  grassy  lane  beside  it  lead 
ing  down  to  the  site  of  the  rude  bridge  and 
the  first  battlefield  of  the  Revolution.  Here 
were  the  headstones  of  the  two  British  sol 
diers,  buried  where  they  fell;  here  the  Con 
cord  monument  erected  in  1836: 

On  this  green  bank,  by  this  soft  stream 
We  set  to-day  a  votive  stone: 

That  memory  may  their  deed  redeem 
When,  like  our  sires,  our  sons  are  gone. 

In  the  field  across  the  river  was  the  spirited 

statue  of  the  minuteman,  designed  by  young 

68 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 

Daniel  Chester  French,  a  Concord  boy  who 
has  since  distinguished  himself  as  a  sculptor 
in  wider  fields  and  more  imposing  works. 

The  social  life  of  Concord,  judging  from 
such   glimpses    as    could   be   had   of   it,   was 
peculiar.     It  was  the  life  of  a  village  com 
munity,  marked  by   the   friendly   simplicity 
of  country  neighbors,  but  marked   also  by 
unusual   intellectual  distinction  and  an  ad 
diction  to  "the  things  of  the  mind."    "The 
town  was  not  at  all  provincial,  or  what  the 
Germans  call  kleinstadtisch: — cosmopolitan, 
rather,  as  lying  on  the  highway  of  thought. 
It  gave  one  a  thrill,   for  example,  to  meet 
Mr.   Emerson  coming   from  the  Post   Office 
with  his  mail,  like  any  ordinary  citizen.     The 
petty   constraint,   the   narrow   standards   of 
conduct  which  are  sometimes  the  bane  of  vil 
lage  life  were  almost  unknown.      Transcen 
dental  freedom  of  speculation,  all  manner  of 
heterodoxies,  and  the  individual  queernesses 
of  those  whom  the  world  calls  "cranks," 'had 
produced  a  general  tolerance.     Thus  it  was 
said,  that  the  only  reason  why  services  were 
held  in  the  Unitarian  Church  on  Sunday  was 
because  Judge  Hoar  didn't  quite  like  to  play 
whist  on  that  day.     Many  of  the  Concord 
houses    have    gardens    bordering    upon    the 
river;   and   I  was   interested  to  notice  that 
the  boats  moored  at  the  bank  had  painted 
on  their  sterns  plant  names  or  bird  names 
69 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

taken  from  the  Concord  poems — such  as 
"The  Rhodora,"  "The  Veery,"  "The  Lin- 
nsea,"  and  "The  Wood  Thrush."  Many  a 
summer  hour  I  spent  with  Edward  Hoar  in 
his  skiff,  rowing,  or  sailing,  or  floating  up 
and  down  on  this  soft  Concord  stream — 
Musketaquit,  or  "grass-ground  river" — 
moving  through  miles  of  meadow,  fringed 
with  willows  and  button  bushes,  with  a  cur 
rent  so  languid,  said  Hawthorne,  that  the 
eye  cannot  detect  which  way  it  flows.  Some 
times  we  sailed  as  far  as  Fair  Haven  Bay, 
whose  "dark  and  sober  billows,"  "when  the 
wind  blows  freshly  on  a  raw  March  day," 
Thoreau  thought  as  fine  as  anything  on  Lake 
Huron  or  the  northwest  coast.  Nor  were  we, 
I  hope,  altogether  unperceiving  of  that  other 
river  which  Emerson  detected  flowing  under 
neath  the  Concord — 

Thy  summer  voice,  Musketaquit, 

Repeats  the  music  of  the  rain, 
But  sweeter  rivers  pulsing  flit 

Through  thee  as  though  through  Concord 
plain.   .  .  . 

I  see  the  inundation  sweet, 

I  hear  the  spending  of  the  stream, 
Through  years,  through  men,  through  nature 

fleet, 

Through  love  and  thought,  through  power 
and  dream. 

70 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 

Edward  Hoar  had  been  Thoreau's  com 
panion  in  one  of  his  visits  to  the  Maine  woods. 
He  knew  the  flora  and  fauna  of  Concord  as 
well  as  his  friend  the  poet-naturalist.  He 
had  a  large  experience  of  the  world,  had  run 
a  ranch  in  New  Mexico  and  an  orange  plan 
tation  in  Sicily.  He  was  not  so  well  known 
to  the  jmblic  as  his  brothers,  Rockwood 
Hoar,  Attorney  General  in  Grant's  Cabinet, 
and  the  late  Senator  George  Frisbie  Hoar, 
of  Worcester;  but  I  am  persuaded  that  he 
was  just  as  good  company;  and,  then,  neither 
of  these  distinguished  gentlemen  would  have 
wasted  whole  afternoons  in  eating  the  lotus 
along  the  quiet  reaches  of  the  Musketaquit 
•with  a  stripling  philosopher. 

The  appetite  for  discussion  not  being  fully 
satisfied  by  the  stated  meetings  of  the  School 
in  the  Orchard  House,  the  hospitable  Con 
cord  folks  opened  their  houses  for  informal 
symposia  in  the  evenings.  I  was  privileged 
to  make  one  of  a  company  that  gathered  in 
Emerson's  library.  The  subject  for  the 
evening  was  Shakespeare,  and  Emerson  read, 
by  request,  that  mysterious  little  poem  "The 
Phrenix  and  the  Turtle,"  attributed  to 
Shakespeare  on  rather  doubtful  evidence,  but 
included  for  some  reason  in  Emerson's  vol 
ume  of  favorite  selections,  "Parnassus." 
He  began  by  saying  that  he  would  not  him 
self  have  chosen  this  particular  piece,  but  as 
71 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

it  had  been  chosen  for  him  he  would  read  it. 
And  this  he  did,  with  that  clean-cut,  refined 
enunciation  and  subtle  distribution  of  em 
phasis  which  made  the  charm  of  his  delivery 
as  a  lyceum  lecturer.  When  he  came  to  the 
couplet, 

Truth  may  seem,  but  cannot  be, 
Beauty  brag,  but  'tis  not  she, 

I  thought  that  I  detected  an  idealistic  impli 
cation  in  the  lines  which  accounted  for  their 
presence  in  "Parnassus." 

That  shy  recluse,  Ellery  Channing,  most 
eccentric  of  the  transcendentalists,  was  not 
to  be  found  at  the  School  or  the  evening 
symposia.  He  had  married  a  sister  of  Mar 
garet  Fuller,  but  for  years  he  had  lived  alone 
and  done  for  himself,  and  his  oddities  had 
increased  upon  him  with  the  years.  I  had 
read  and  liked  many  of  his  poems — those 
poems  so  savagely  cut  up  by  Poe,  when  first 
published  in  1843 — and  my  expressed  in 
terest  in  these  foundlings  of  the  Muse  gave 
me  the  opportunity  to  meet  the  author  of 
"A  Poet's  Hope"  at  one  hospitable  table 
where  he  was  accustomed  to  sup  on  a  stated 
evening  every  week. 

The  Concord  Summer  School  of  Philoso 
phy  went  on  for  ten  successive  years,  but  I 
never  managed  to  attend  another  session. 
A  friend  from  New  Haven,  who  was  there 
72 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 
for  a  few  days  in  1880,  brought  back  the 
news  that  a  certain  young  lady  who  was  just 
beginning  the  study  of  Hegel  the  year  before, 
had  now  got  up  to  the  second  intention,  and 
hoped  in  time  to  attain  the  sixth.  I  never 
got  far  enough  in  Mr.  Harris's  lectures  to 
discover  what  Hegelian  intentions  were;  but 
my  friend  spoke  of  them  as  if  they  were  some 
thing  like  degrees  in  Masonry.  In  1905  I 
visited  Concord  for  the  first  and  only  time 
in  twenty-six  years.  There  is  a  good  deal 
of  philosophy  in  Wordsworth's  Yarrow 
poems — 

For  when  we're  there,  although  'tis  fair, 
'Twill  be  another  Yarrow ! — 

and  I  have  heard  it  suggested  that  he  might 
well  have  added  to  his  trilogy,  a  fourth  mem 
ber,  "Yarrow  Unrevisited."  There  is  a  loss, 
though  Concord  bears  the  strain  better  than 
most  places,  I  think.  As  we  go  on  in  life 
the  world  gets  full  of  ghosts,  and  at  the 
capital  of  transcendentalism  I  was  peculiarly 
conscious  of  the  haunting  of  these  spiritual 
presences.  Since  I  had  been  there  before, 
Emerson  and  Alcott  and  Ellery  Channing 
and  my  courteous  host  and  companion, 
Edward  Hoar,  and  my  kind  old  landlady 
Miss  Barrett — who  had  also  been  Emerson's 
landlady  and  indeed  everybody's  landlady  in 
Concord,  and  whom  her  youngest  boarders 
73 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

addressed  affectionately  as  Emma — all  these 
and  many  more  had  joined  the  sleepers  in 
Sleepy  Hollow.  The  town  itself  has  suffered 
comparatively  few  changes.  True  there  is 
a  trolley  line  through  the  main  street — oddly 
called  "The  Milldam,"  and  in  Walden  wood 
I  met  an  automobile  not  far  from  the  cairn, 
or  stone  pile,  which  marks  the  site  of  Tho- 
reau's  cabin.  But  the  woods  themselves  were 
intact  and  the  limpid  waters  of  the  pond  had 
not  been  tapped  to  furnish  power  for  any 
electric  light  company.  The  Old  Manse 
looked  much  the  same,  and  so  did  the  Way 
side  and  the  Orchard  House.  Not  a  tree  was 
missing  from  the  mystic  ring  of  tall  pines 
in  front  of  Emerson's  house  at  the  fork  of 
the  Cambridge  and  Lexington  roads.  On 
the  central  square  the  ancient  tavern  was 
gone  where  I  had  lodged  on  the  night  of  my 
arrival  and  where  my  host,  a  practical  phi 
losopher — everyone  in  Concord  had  his  phi 
losophy, — took  a  gloomy  view  of  the  local 
potentialities  of  the  hotel  business.  He  said 
there  was  nothing  doing — some  milk  and 
asparagus  were  raised  for  the  Boston  market, 
but  the  inhabitants  were  mostly  literary 
people.  "I  suppose,"  he  added,  "we've  got 
the  smartest  literary  man  in  the  country 
living  right  here."  "You  mean  Mr.  Emer 
son,"  I  suggested.  "Yes,  sir,  and  a  gentle 
man  too." 

74 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 

"And  Alcott?"  I  ventured. 

"Oh,  Alcott !  The  best  thing  he  ever  did 
was  his  daughters." 

This  inn  was  gone,  but  the  still  more 
ancient  one  across  the  square  remains,  the 
tavern  where  Major  Pitcairn  dined  on  the 
day  of  the  Lexington  fight,  and  from  whose 
windows  or  door  steps  he  is  alleged  by  the 
history  books  to  have  cried  to  a  group  of 
embattled  farmers,  "Disperse,  ye  Yankee 
rebels." 

Concord  is  well  preserved.  Still  there  are 
subtle  indications  of  the  flight  of  time.  For 
one  thing,  the  literary  pilgrimage  business 
has  increased,  partly  no  doubt  because  trol 
leys,  automobiles,  and  bicycles  have  made  the 
town  more  accessible;  but  also  because  our 
literature  is  a  generation  older  than  it  was 
in  1879.  The  study  of  American  authors 
has  been  systematically  introduced  into  the 
public  schools.  The  men  who  made  Concord 
famous  are  dead,  but  their  habitat  has  be 
come  increasingly  classic  ground  as  they 
themselves  have  receded  into  a  dignified,  his 
toric  past.  At  any  rate,  the  trail  of  the 
excursionist — the  "cheap  tripper,"  as  he  is 
called  in  England, — is  over  it  all.  Basket 
parties  had  evidently  eaten  many  a  luncheon 
on  the  first  battle-field  of  the  Revolution,  and 
notices overe  posted  about,  asking  the  public 
not  to  detace  the  trees,  and  instructing  them 
75 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

where  to  put  their  paper  wrappers  and  frag- 
menta  regalia.  I  could  imagine  Boston 
schoolma'ams  pointing  out  to  their  classes, 
the  minuteman,  the  monument,  and  other 
objects  of  interest,  and  calling  for  names  and 
dates.  The  shores  of  Walden  were  trampled 
and  worn  in  spots.  There  were  spring 
boards  there  for  diving,  and  traces  of  the 
picnicker  were  everywhere.  Trespassers 
were  warned  away  from  the  grounds  of  the 
Old  Manse  and  similar  historic  spots,  by 
signs  of  "Private  Property." 

Concord  has  grown  more  self-conscious 
under  the  pressure  of  all  this  publicity  and 
resort.  Tablets  and  inscriptions  have  been 
put  up  at  points  of  interest.  As  I  was  read 
ing  one  of  these  on  the  square,  I  was  ap 
proached  by  a  man  who  handed  me  a  business 
card  with  photographs  of  the  monument,  the 
Wayside,  the  four-hundred-year-old  oak, 

with  information  to  the  effect  that  Mr. 

would  furnish  guides  and  livery  teams  about 
the  town  and  to  places  as  far  distant  as 
Walden  Pond  and  Sudbury  Inn.  Thus 
poetry  becomes  an  asset,  and  transcenden 
talism  is  exploited  after  the  poet  and  the 
philosopher  are  dead.  It  took  Emerson 
eleven  years  to  sell  five  hundred  copies  of 
"Nature,"  and  Thoreau's  books  came  back 
upon  his  hands  as  unsalable  and  were  piled 
up  in  the  attic  like  cord-wood.  I  was  im- 
76 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 
pressed  anew  with  the  tameness  of  the  Con 
cord  landscape.  There  is  nothing  salient 
about  it :  it  is  the  average  mean  of  New  Eng 
land  nature.  Berkshire  is  incomparably 
more  beautiful.  And  yet  those  flat  meadows 
and  low  hills  and  slow  streams  are  dear  to 
the  imagination,  since  genius  has  looked 
upon  them  and  made  them  its  own.  "The 
eye,"  said  Emerson,  "is  the  first  circle:  the 
horizon  the  second." 

And  the  Concord  books — how  do  they  bear 
the  test  of  revisitation?  To  me,  at  least, 
they  have — even  some  of  the  second-rate 
papers  in  the  "Dial"  have — now  nearly  fifty 
years  since  I  read  them  first,  that  freshness 
which  is  the  mark  of  immortality. 

No  ray  is  dimmed,  no  atom  worn : 
My  oldest  force  is  good  as  new; 

And  the  fresh  rose  on  yonder  thorn 

Gives  back  the  bending  heavens  in  dew. 

I  think  I  do  not  mistake,  and  confer  upon 
them  the  youth  which  was  then  mine.  No, 
the  morning  light  had  touched  their  fore 
heads  :  the  youthfulness  was  in  them. 

Lately  I  saw  a  newspaper  item  about  one 
of  the  thirty  thousand  literary  pilgrims  who 
are  said  to  visit  Concord  annually.  Calling 
upon  Mr.  Sanborn,  he  asked  him  which  of 
the  Concord  authors  he  thought  would  last 
longest.  The  answer,  somewhat  to  his  sur- 
77 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

prise,  was  "Thoreau."  I  do  not  know  whether 
this  report  is  authentic;  but  supposing  it 
true,  it  is  not  inexplicable.  I  will  confess  that, 
of  recent  years,  I  find  myself  reading  Thoreau 
more  and  Emerson  less.  "Walden"  seems  to 
me  more  of  a  book  than  Emerson  ever  wrote. 
Emerson's  was  incomparably  the  larger 
nature,  the  more  liberal  and  gracious  soul. 
His,  too,  was  the  seminal  mind;  though 
Lowell  was  unfair  to  the  disciple,  when  he 
described  him  as  a  pistillate  blossom  fer 
tilized  by  the  Emersonian  pollen.  For  Tho 
reau  had  an  originality  of  his  own — a  flavor 
as  individual  as  the  tang  of  the  bog  cran 
berry,  or  the  wild  apples  which  he  loved. 
One  secure  advantage  he  possesses  in  the 
concreteness  of  his  subject-matter.  The 
master,  with  his  abstract  habit  of  mind  and 
his  view  of  the  merely  phenomenal  character 
of  the  objects  of  sense,  took  up  a  somewhat 
incurious  attitude  towards  details,  not  think 
ing  it  worth  while  to  "examine  too  micro 
scopically  the  universal  tablet."  The  dis 
ciple,  though  he  professed  that  the  other 
world  was  all  his  art,  had  a  sharp  eye  for  this. 
Emerson  was  Nature's  lover,  but  Thoreau 
was  her  scholar.  Emerson's  method  was  in 
tuition,  while  Thoreau's  was  observation. 
He  worked  harder  than  Emerson  and  knew 
more, — that  is,  within  certain  defined  limits. 
Thus  he  read  the  Greek  poets  in  the  original. 
78 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 

Emerson,  in  whom  there  was  a  spice  of  indo 
lence — due,  say  his  biographers,  to  feeble 
health  in  early  life,  and  the  need  of  going 
slow, — read  them  in  translations  and  excused 
himself  on  the  ground  that  he  liked  to  be 
beholden  to  the  great  English  language. 

Compare  Hawthorne's  description,  in  the 
"Mosses,"  of  a  day  spent  on  the  Assabeth 
with  Ellery  Channing,  with  any  chapter  in 
Thoreau's  "Week."  Moonlight  and  high 
noon!  The  great  romancer  gives  a  dreamy, 
poetic  version  of  the  river  landscape,  musi 
cally  phrased,  pictorially  composed,  dis 
solved  in  atmosphere — a  lovely  piece  of  lit 
erary  art,  with  the  soft  blur  of  a  mezzotint 
engraving,  say,  from  the  designs  by  Turner 
in  Rogers's  "Italy."  Thoreau,  equally  im 
aginative  in  his  way,  writes  like  a  botanist, 
naturalist,  surveyor,  and  local  antiquary; 
and  in  a  pungent,  practical,  business-like 
style — a  style,  as  was  said  of  Dante,  in  which 
words  are  things.  Yet  which  of  these  was 
the  true  transcendentalist? 

Matthew  Arnold's  discourse  on  Emerson 
was  received  with  strong  dissent  in  Boston, 
where  it  was  delivered,  and  in  Concord,  where 
it  was  read  with  indignation.  The  critic 
seemed  to  be  taking  away,  one  after  another, 
our  venerated  master's  claims  as  a  poet,  a 
man  of  letters,  and  a  philosopher.  What ! 
Gray  a  great  poet,  and  Emerson  not !  Addi- 
79 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

son  a  great  writer,  and  Emerson  not !  Surely 
there  are  heights  and  depths  in  Emerson,  an 
inspiring  power,  an  originality  and  force  of 
thought  which  are  neither  in  Gray  nor  in 
Addison.  And  how  can  these  denials  be  con 
sistent  with  the  sentence  near  the  end  of  the 
discourse,  pronouncing  Emerson's  essays 
the  most  important  work  done  in  English 
prose  during  the  nineteenth  century — more 
important  than  Carlyle's  ?  A  truly  enormous 
concession  this ;  how  to  reconcile  it  with  those 
preceding  blasphemies  ? 

Let  not  the  lightning  strike  me  if  I  say 
that  I  think  Arnold  was  right — as  he  usually 
was  right  in  a  question  of  taste  or  critical 
discernment.  For  Emerson  was  essentially 
a  prophet  and  theosophist,  and  not  a  man  of 
letters,  or  creative  artist.  He  could  not  have 
written  a  song  or  a  story  or  a  play.  Arnold 
complains  of  his  want  of  concreteness.  The 
essay  was  his  chosen  medium,  well-nigh  the 
least  concrete,  the  least  literary  of  forms. 
And  it  was  not  even  the  personal  essay,  like 
Elia's,  that  he  practised,  but  an  abstract 
variety,  a  lyceum  lecture,  a  moralizing  dis 
course  or  sermon.  For  the  clerical  virus  was 
strong  in  Emerson,  and  it  was  not  for  noth 
ing  that  he  was  descended  from  eight  genera 
tions  of  preachers.  His  concern  was  pri 
marily  with  religion  and  ethics,  not  with  the 
tragedy  and  comedy  of  personal  lives,  this 
80 


A  PILGRIM  IN  CONCORD 
motley  face  of  things,  das  bunte  Menschenle- 
ben.  Anecdotes  and  testimonies  abound  to 
illustrate  this.  See  him  on  his  travels  in 
Europe,  least  picturesque  of  tourists,  hasten 
ing  with  almost  comic  precipitation  past 
galleries,  cathedrals,  ancient  ruins,  Swiss 
alps,  Como  lakes,  Rhine  castles,  Venetian 
lagoons,  costumed  peasants,  "the  great  sinful 
streets  of  Naples" — and  of  Paris, — and  all 
manner  and  description  of  local  color  and 
historic  associations ;  hastening  to  meet  and 
talk  with  "a  few  minds" — Landor,  Words 
worth,  Carlyle.  Here  he  was  in  line,  indeed, 
with  his  great  friend,  impatiently  waving 
aside  the  art  patter,  with  which  Sterling 
filled  his  letters  from  Italy.  "Among  the 
windy  gospels,"  complains  Carlyle,  "ad 
dressed  to  our  poor  Century  there  are  few 
louder  than  this  of  Art.  ...  It  is  a  subject 
on  which  earnest  men  .  .  .  had  better  .  .  . 
'perambulate  their  picture-gallery  with  little 
or  no  speech.'  "  "Emerson  has  never  in  his 
life,"  affirms  Mr.  John  Jay  Chapman,  "felt 
the  normal  appeal  of  any  painting,  or  any 
sculpture,  or  any  architecture,  or  any  music. 
These  things,  of  which  he  does  not  know  the 
meaning  in  real  life,  he  yet  uses,  and  uses 
constantly,  as  symbols  to  convey  ethical 
truths.  The  result  is  that  his  books  are  full 
of  blind  places,  like  the  notes  which  will  not 
strike  on  a  sick  piano."  The  biographers 
81 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

tell  us  that  he  had  no  ear  for  music  and  could 
not  distinguish  one  tune  from  another;  did 
not  care  for  pictures  nor  for  garden  flowers ; 
could  see  nothing  in  Dante's  poetry  nor  in 
Shelley's,  nor  in  Hawthorne's  romances,  nor 
in  the  novels  of  Dickens  and  Jane  Austen. 
Edgar  Poe  was  to  him  "the  jingle  man." 
Poe,  of  course,  had  no  "message." 

I  read,  a  number  of  years  ago,  some  im 
pressions  of  Concord  by  Roger  Riordan,  the 
poet  and  art  critic.  I  cannot  now  put  my 
hand,  for  purposes  of  quotation,  upon  the 
title  of  the  periodical  in  which  these  ap 
peared;  but  I  remember  that  the  writer  was 
greatly  amused,  as  well  as  somewhat  pro 
voked,  by  his  inability  to  get  any  of  the  phi 
losophers  with  whom  he  sought  interviews  to 
take  an  aesthetic  view  of  any  poem,  or  paint 
ing,  or  other  art  product.  They  would  talk 
of  its  "message"  or  its  "ethical  content"; 
but  as  to  questions  of  technique  or  beauty, 
they  gently  put  them  one  side  as  unworthy 
to  engage  the  attention  of  earnest  souls. 

At  the  symposium  which  I  have  mentioned 
in  Emerson's  library,  was  present  a  young 
philosopher  who  had  had  the  advantage  of 
reading — perhaps  in  proof  sheets — a  book 
about  Shakespeare  by  Mr.  Denton  J.  Snider. 
He  was  questioned  by  some  of  the  guests  as 
to  the  character  of  the  work,  but  modestly 
declined  to  essav  a  description  of  it  in  the 
82 


A  PILGRIM  IN  COJSCOKD 
presence  of  such  eminent  persons ;  venturing 
only  to  say  that  it  "gave  the  ethical  view  of 
Shakespeare,"  information  which  was  re 
ceived  by  the  company  with  silent  but  mani 
fest  approval. 

Yet,  after  all,  what  does  it  matter  whether 
Emerson  was  singly  any  one  of  those  things 
which  Matthew  Arnold  says  he  was  not — 
great  poet,  great  writer,  great  philosophical 
thinker?  These  are  matters  of  classification 
and  definition.  We  know  well  enough  the 
rare  combination  of  qualities  which  made  him 
our  Emerson.  Let  us  leave  it  there.  Even 
as  a  formal  verse-writer,  when  he  does  emerge 
from  his  cloud  of  encumbrances,  it  is  in  some 
supernal  phrase  such  as  only  the  great  poets 
have  the  secret  of : 

Music  pours  on  mortals  its  beautiful  disdain; 


Have  I  a  lover  who  is  noble  and  free? 
I  would  he  were  nobler  than  to  love  me. 


83 


A  WORDLET  ABOUT  WHITMAN 

IN  this  year  many  fames  have  come  of  age; 
among  them,  Lowell's  and  Walt  Whit 
man's.  As  we  read  their  centenary  tributes, 
we  are  reminded  that  Lowell  never  accepted 
Whitman,  who  was  piqued  by  the  fact  and 
referred  to  it  a  number  of  times  in  the  con 
versations  reported  by  the  Boswellian  Trau- 
bel.  Whitmanites  explain  this  want  of  appre 
ciation  as  owing  to  Lowell's  conventional 
literary  standards. 

Now  convention  is  one  of  the  things  that 
distinguish  man  from  the  inferior  animals. 
Language  is  a  convention,  law  is  a  conven 
tion ;  and  so  are  the  church  and  the  state, 
morals,  manners,  clothing — teste  "Sartor 
Resartus."  Shame  is  a  convention:  it  is 
human.  The  animals  are  without  shame,  and 
so  is  Whitman.  His  "Children  of  Adam"  are 
the  children  of  our  common  father  before  he 
had  tasted  the  forbidden  fruit  and  discovered 
that  he  was  naked. 

Poetry,  too,  has  its  conventions,  among 
them,  metre,  rhythm,  and  rhyme,  the  choice 
of  certain  words,  phrases,  images,  and 
topics,  and  the  rejection  of  certain  others. 
Lowell  was  conservative  by  nature  and  thor- 
85 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

oughly  steeped  in  the  tradition  of  letters. 
Perhaps  he  was  too  tightly  bound  by  these 
fetters  of  convention  to  relish  their  sudden 
loosening.  I  wonder  what  he  would  have 
thought  of  his  kinswoman  Amy's  free  verses 
if  he  had  lived  to  read  them. 

If  a  large,  good-natured,  clean,  healthy 
animal  could  write  poetry,  it  would  write 
much  such  poetry  as  the  "Leaves  of  Grass." 
It  would  tell  how  good  it  is  to  lie  and  bask 
in  the  warm  sun;  to  stand  in  cool,  flowing 
water,  to  be  naked  in  the  fresh  air ;  to  troop 
with  friendly  companions  and  embrace  one's 
mate.  "Leaves  of  Grass"  is  the  poetry  of 
pure  sensation,  and  mainly,  though  not 
wholly,  of  physical  sensation.  In  a  famous 
passage  the  poet  says  that  he  wants  to  go 
away  and  live  with  the  animals.  Not  one  of 
them  is  respectable  or  sorry  or  conscientious 
or  worried  about  its  sins. 

But  his  poetry,  though  animal  to  a  degree, 
is  not  unhuman.  We  do  not  know  enough 
about  the  psychology  of  the  animals  to  be 
sure  whether,  or  not,  they  have  any  sense  of 
the  world  as  a  whole.  Does  an  elephant  or 
an  eagle  perhaps,  viewing  some  immense  land 
scape,  catch  any  glimpse  of  the  universe,  as 
an  object  of  contemplation,  apart  from  the 
satisfaction  of  his  own  sensual  needs?  Prob 
ably  not.  But  Whitman,  as  has  been  said 
a  hundred  times,  was  "cosmic."  He  had  an 
86 


A  WORDLET  ABOUT  WHITMAN 
unequalled  sense  of  the  bigness  of  creation 
and  of  "these  States."  He  owned  a  pano 
ramic  eye  and  a  large  passive  imagination, 
and  did  well  to  loaf  and  let  the  tides  of  sensa 
tion  flow  over  his  soul,  drawing  out  what 
music  was  in  him  without  much  care  for 
arrangement  or  selection. 

I  once  heard  an  admirer  of  Walt  chal 
lenged  to  name  a  single  masterpiece  of  his 
production.  Where  was  his  perfect  poem, 
his  gem  of  flawless  workmanship?  He  an 
swered,  in  effect,  that  he  didn't  make  master 
pieces.  His  poetry  was  diffused,  like  the 
grass  blades  that  symbolized  for  him  our "' 
democratic  masses. 

Of  course,  the  man  in  the  street  thinks  that 
Walt  Whitman's  stuff  is  not  poetry  at  all, 
but  just  bad  prose.  He  acknowledges  that 
there  are  splendid  lines,  phrases,  and  whole 
passages.  There  is  that  one  beginning,  "I 
open  my  scuttle  at  night,"  and  that  glorious 
apostrophe  to  the  summer  night,  "Night  of 
south  winds,  night  of  the  large,  few  stars." 
But,  as  a  whole,  his  work  is  tiresome  and 
without  art.  It  is  alive,  to  be  sure,  but  so  is 
protoplasm.  Life  is  the  first  thing  and  form 
is  secondary;  yet  form,  too,  is  important. 
The  musician,  too  lazy  or  too  impatient  to 
master  his  instrument,  breaks  it,  and  seizes 
a  megaphone.  Shall  we  call  that  originality 
or  failure? 

87 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

It  is  also  a  commonplace  that  the  demo 
cratic  masses  of  America  have  never  accepted 
Walt  Whitman  as  their  spokesman.  They 
do  not  read  him,  do  not  understand  or  care 
for  him.  They  like  Longfellow,  Whittier, 
and  James  Whitcomb  Riley,  poets  of  senti 
ment  and  domestic  life,  truly  poets  of  the 
people.  No  man  can  be  a  spokesman  for 
America  who  lacks  a  sense  of  humor,  and 
Whitman  was  utterly  devoid  of  it,  took  him 
self  most  seriously,  posed  as  a  prophet.  I 
do  not  say  that  humor  is  a  desirable  quality. 
The  thesis  may  even  be  maintained  that  it  is 
a  disease  of  the  mind,  a  false  way  of  looking 
at  things.  Many  great  poets  have  been 
without  it — Milton  for  example.  Shelley 
used  to  speak  of  "the  withering  and  pervert 
ing  power  of  comedy."  But  Shelley  was 
slightly  mad.  At  all  events,  our  really 
democratic  writers  have  been  such  as  Mark 
Twain  and  James  Whitcomb  Riley.  I  do 
not  know  what  Mark  Twain  thought  of  Walt, 
but  I  know  what  Riley  thought  of  him.  He 
thought  him  a  grand  humbug.  Certainly  if 
he  had  had  any  sense  of  humor  he  would  not 
have  peppered  his  poems  so  naively  with  for 
eign  words,  calling  out  "Camerado !"  ever  and 
anon,  and  speaking  of  a  perfectly  good 
American  sidewalk  as  a  "trottoir"  quasi 
Lutetia  Parisii.  And  if  he  had  not  had  a 
streak  of  humbug  in  him,  he  would  hardly 
88 


A  WORDLET  ABOUT  WHITMAN 

have  written  anonymous  puffs  of  his  own 
poetry. 

But  I  am  far  from  thinking  Walt  Whitman 
a  humbug.  He  was  a  man  of  genius  whose 
work  had  a  very  solid  core  of  genuine  mean 
ing.  It  is  good  to  read  him  in  spots — he  is 
so  big  and  friendly  and  wholesome ;  he  feels 
so  good,  like  a  man  who  has  just  had  a  cold 
bath  and  tingles  with  the  joy  of  existence. 

Whitman  was  no  humbug,  but  there  is 
surely  some  humbug  about  the  Whitman 
culte.  The  Whitmanites  deify  him.  They 
speak  of  him  constantly  as  a  seer,  a  man  of 
exalted  intellect.  I  do  not  believe  that  he  was 
a  great  thinker,  but  only  a  great  feeler. 
Was  he  the  great  poet  of  America,  or  even 
a  great  poet  at  all?  A  great  poet  includes 
a  great  artist,  and  "Leaves  of  Grass,"  as  has 
been  pointed  out  times  without  number,  is  the 
raw  material  of  poetry  rather  than  the  fin 
ished  product. 

A  friend  of  mine  once  wrote  an  article 
about  Whitman,  favorable  on  the  whole,  but 
with  qualifications.  He  got  back  a  copy  of 
it  through  the  mail,  with  the  word  "Jackass  !" 
pencilled  on  the  margin  by  some  outraged 
Whitmaniac.  I  know  what  has  been  said  and 
written  in  praise  of  old  Walt  by  critics  of 
high  authority,  and  I  go  along  with  them  a 
part  of  the  way,  but  only  a  part.  And  I  do 
not  stand  in  terror  of  any  critics,  however 
89 


FOUR  AMERICANS 

authoritative;  remembering  how  even  the 
great  Goethe  was  taken  in  by  Macpherson's 
"Ossian."  A  very  interesting  paper  might 
be  written  on  what  illustrious  authors  have 
said  of  each  other :  what  Carlyle  said  of  New 
man,  for  instance ;  or  what  Walter  Scott  said 
of  Joanna  Baillie  and  the  like. 


90 


PRINTED    IN    UNITED    STATES    OF    AMERICA 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 


AN  INITIAL  FINE  OF  25  CENTS 

WILL  BE  ASSESSED  FOR  FAILURE  TO  RETURN 
THIS  BOOK  ON  THE  DATE  DUE.  THE  PENALTY 
WILL  INCREASE  TO  SO  CENTS  ON  THE  FOURTH 
DAY  AND  TO  $1.OO  ON  THE  SEVENTH  DAY 
OVERDUE. 


I 


'-PR    13  1943 


f     f) 

!'~«S.w^ 


APR  14  1943      fVOV  1  1  1955 


4  t:4j 


947 


LD 


DecllMSHW 


,.y  u.  5  1  F  « 


NOV1019; 


l-lOfe-L-1/;^  ("4 


02R) 


415492 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


